Artificial Intelligence for Robotics - Second Edition

6

Teaching a Robot to Listen

Teaching a robot to listen to spoken instructions is a whole discipline in itself. It is not sufficient for the robot to just recognize individual words or some canned phrase. We want the robot to respond to normal spoken commands with a normal variety of phrasing. We might say, “Pick up the toys,” or “Please pick up all the toys,” or “Clean this mess up,” any of which would be a valid command to instruct the robot to begin searching the room for toys to pick up and put away. We will be using a variety of techniques and processes for this chapter. We are going to be building on an open source verbal assistant called Mycroft, an AI-based speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP) engine that can be programmed ...