The BBC Shipping Forecast is one of those strange bits of national tradition which, somehow, bridges the gap between infrastructure and folklore. You can listen listen to the latest forecast on the BBC - read by professional newscasters. But what if we wanted a robot to read it? If our speaker is sick, bored, or too expensive - how would we automate the audio version of the Shipping Forecast? The BBC publishes the general forecast - but it's important to note that this is not what is read…
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Imagine that you are sat, blindfolded, in the back of a taxi. How could you tell if you were being driven by a human or an autonomous vehicle? If you've not read Alan Turing's The Imitation Game, I can highly recommend it. The paper is short, well written, and contains a whole world of ideas. This is where we get the concept of the Turing Test. Can a human be fooled into thinking that the computer they are communicating with is a human? It is often assumed that the communication must be…
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C-3P0 doesn't have a schnoz. The degloved terminator has a bleak hole where his snout should be. Both the Jetson's Rosie and Futurama's Bender are arhinotic. The robot sat in front of me was different. The RoboThespian is an imposing chunk of metal. LEDs blink as servomotors whine. The exposed wiring twists as the arms flex in a crude approximation of humanity. But the face... Oh! The face! A smoothly formed impression of a human face - cheekbones, a chin, shallow dimples for eyes. And a…
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Last week I was invited to attend a product launch by BQ. They're a small company based out of Spain who create some curiously innovative products - including smartphones which natively run Cyanogen. I'm particularly looking forward to reviewing their Ubuntu Tablet later in the year. The thing which really caught my eye was Zowi (pronounced Zoë). It looks like this: And it dances like this: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/zowi.mp4 Ok, but what is it? Here's what you …
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