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Tigal announced the VoiceGP family of products under its VeeaR brand of voice and speech recognition products. The product family consists of the VoiceGP module and two development kits with bundled development software. It combines all the hardware and software required for easy and cost effective development and implementation of speech synthesis and multi-language speaker independent and speaker dependent speech recognition capabilities to virtually any application, says the manufacturer. The VoiceGP Module is based on Sensory's RSC-4128 mixed signal processor. Its 42x72mm footprint and two 28-pin connectors with 2.54mm pin spacing make the module breadboard friendly and suitable for prototype boards.

Today face.com is proud to announce the opening of our platform APIs! After scanning billions of photos and tagging over 50 million users through Photo Tagger and Photo Finder, we’re moving ahead with our goal of making face recognition approachable and available to all. In this open alpha stage, we’re letting any developer tap into our face detection and face recognition tech through simple REST API calls. Whether you’re looking to build a cool photo tagging application, create personalized e-cards or campaigns, or any other sci-fi idea that comes to mind, we’re here to serve. A friend of the company, world-famous programmer, developer and founder of Technorati David Sifry got an early look at our API.  In David’s own words: “I’ve been impressed with Face.com’s API, and their plan for working closely with developers to build great applications that incorporate face detection and face recognition. Open platforms like this one will enable the creation of exciting new applications that we’ve never seen before at scale.”

Remember Hitachi’s little helper robot, EMIEW 2 (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Work-mate)?  It’s been a couple of years since we heard anything regarding the project and we feared the worst.  Hitachi has put those fears to rest by holding a news conference to show off its new enhanced voice recognition and driving performance! Known primarily for its unique legs which have wheels for feet, EMIEW 2 can drive at up to 6km/h to keep pace with people.  If it needs to carry something it can kneel down (for added stability) and scoot around, and thanks to its bipedal legs it can step over obstacles that are too high to drive over.  Now it has been given adaptive suspension control technology which increases its stability when driving over bumpy terrain such as elevator doors.  During the press demonstration, EMIEW 2′s springy legs bobbed independently as it drove over cables and uneven flooring.

Researchers at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research are working on a new mathematical model to mimic the human brain's ability to identify objects. The model can predict human performance on certain visual-perception tasks suggesting it’s a good indication of what's actually happening in the brain. Researchers are hoping the new findings will make their way into future object-recognition systems for automation, mobile robotics, and other applications.

With the consumer demand for richer content and its resultant , increasing high data bandwidth continuing to drive communications systems, coding for error control has become extraordinarily important. One way to improve the bit error rate (BER), while maintaining high data reliability, is to use an error correction technique like the Viterbi algorithm. Originally conceived by Andrew Viterbi as an error-correction scheme for noisy digital communication, the Viterbi algorithm provides an efficient method for forward error correction (FEC) that improves channel reliability. Today, it is used in many digital communications systems in applications as diverse as CDMA and GSM digital cellular, dial-up modems, satellite, deep-space communications and 802.11 wireless LANs. It is also commonly used in speech recognition, keyword spotting and computational linguistics.

Developed by Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization and other local institutions, the robot may sound boring (when compared to humanoids, for example), but it’s actually pretty cool. The main bullet points are that it automatically detects how ripe the strawberries are (which fruit is ready for harvesting) and that it cuts the stalks without damaging the strawberries.

Willow Garage is organizing a workshop at the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2010 in San Francisco to discuss the intersection of computer vision with human-robot interaction. Willow Garage is the hardware and open source software organization behind the Robot Operating System (ROS) and the PR robot development platform. Here’s a recent video from Willow Garage of work done at the University of Illinois on how robots can be taught to perceive images:

Carved in stone on a Civil War-era bridge -- a world-class feat of engineering that stands a couple miles northwest of Washington -- are the names of builders and officials of the day.

A key name, however, is missing. New research shows that Virginian Alfred R. Rives led the design and construction of the Cabin John Bridge. Also called the Union Arch Bridge, the aqueduct and roadway reaches 220 feet across Cabin John Creek in a single span -- the world's longest single-span masonry bridge for nearly 40 years and the nation's longest still today.

NAMO (Novel Articulated MObile platform)  is a humanoid robot built by The Institute of Field Robotics (FIBO) at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Thailand. FIBO is active in the RoboCup scene and have developed a wide range of robot types, including an experimental biped.  NAMO was unveiled on March 29th 2010, serving as FIBO’s mascot as part of the university’s 50 year anniversary celebrations.  NAMO will be used to welcome people to the university and may be deployed at museums.  Given its friendly appearance and functionality, it could be used to research human robot interaction and communication. NAMO is 130cm (4′3″) tall and has 16 degrees of freedom.  It moves on a stable three-wheeled omnidirectional base, and is equipped with a Blackfin camera for its vision system.  It is capable of simple gesture recognition, visually tracks humans or objects of interest automatically, and can speak a few phrases in a child-like voice (in Thai).

GetRobo has pointed out a new website by Francisco Paz, which focuses on his experience building an open source personal robot called Qbo.  From the few images on the site Qbo looks remarkably well made and quite similar to NEC’s PaPeRo, meaning it might be used to experiment with image processing, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and (assuming it has wheels) obstacle detection and SLAM.  He also mentions in his blog some of the open source software that’s out in the wild such as OpenCV, Festival, and Sphinx, which would allow you to do some of that.