The number of robots in our society is increasing rapidly. The number of service robots that interact with everyday people already outnumbers industrial robots. The easiest way to communicate with these service robots, such as Roomba or Nao, would be natural speech. But current speech recognition technology has not reached a level yet at which it would be easy to use. Often robots misunderstand words or are not able to make sense of them. Some researchers argue that speech recognition will never reach the level of humans.
Palm Inc. faced a similar problem with hand writing recognition for their handheld computers. They invented Graffiti, an artificial alphabet, that was easy to learn and easy for the computer to recognize. ROILA takes a similar approach by offering an artificial language that is easy to learn for humans and easy to understand for robots. An artificial language as defined by the Oxford Encyclopedia is a language deliberately invented or constructed, especially as a means of communication in computing or information technology.
We reviewed the most successful artificial and natural languages across the dimensions of morphology and phonology (see overview in the form of a large table) and composed a language that is extremely easy to learn. The simple grammar has no irregularities and the words are composed of phonemes that are shared amongst the majority of natural languages. The set of major phonemes was generated from the overview of natural languages. Moreover, we composed a genetic algorithm that generated ROILA’s words in a way that they are easy to pronounce. The same algorithm makes sure that the words in the dictionary sound as different from each other as possible. This helps the speech recognizer to accurately understand the human speaker.
Most previously developed artificial languages have not been able to attract many human speakers, with the exception of Esperanto. However, with the rise of robots a new community on our planet is formed and there is no reason why robots should not have their own language. Soon there will be millions or robots to which you can talk to in the ROILA language. In summary, we aim to design a “Robotic Interaction Language” that addresses the problems associated with speech interaction using natural languages. Our language is constructed on the basis of two important goals, firstly it should be learnable by the user and secondly, the language should be optimized for efficient recognition by a robot.
ROILA is free to use for everybody and we offer all the technical tools and manuals to make your robot understand and speak ROILA. At the same time we offer courses for humans to learn the ROILA language.