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Teaching a baby to speak is more art than science. It begins with babble and almost like magic the child says mama and dada, then no, uh-oh, mine, especially mine. But sometimes children struggle to learn to speak. A team of linguists, computer scientists and psychologists in Britain think robots might help explain why that happens. They've created the world's first baby robot, DeeChee; white plastic skin and a smile of red lights and articulated hands that grab and gesture almost like an infant. Now, scientists hope that DeeChee's silicon brain will help explain what's going on in the minds of human babies, specifically, how sensitivity to particular sounds helps infants learn words.

This article talks about how an Objiwe women built robots in order for the Native American children in her community (and others) to learn their indigenous culture and languages. It is so interesting to program a robot to speak a language to prevent indigenous languages from going endangered/extinct.

An interesting story--my students, you might recall Sheryl Turkle of MIT referencing robot therapists in her TED talk. USC has developed a robot therapist, Ellie, designed to talk to people who are struggling emotionally, and to take their measure in a way no human can. Originally developed to work with military PTSD patients, Ellie's purpose: to gather information and provide real human therapists detailed analysis of patients' movements and vocal features, in order to give new insights into people struggling with emotional issues. The body, face and voice express things that words sometimes obscure. Ellie's makers believe that her ability to do this will ultimately revolutionize American mental health care.

"As the world's leading linguist, what are your thoughts on Watson, the robot that will be appearing on "Jeopardy"?"

Choosing a voice has implications for design, branding or interacting with machines. A voice can change or harden how we see each other. Research suggests that users prefer a younger, female voice for their digital personal assistant. We don't just need that computerized voice to meet our expectations, said Justine Cassell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. We need computers to relate to us and put us at ease when performing a task. "We have to know that the other is enough like us that it will run our program correctly," she said. That need seems to start young. Ms. Cassell has designed an avatar of indeterminate race and gender for 5-year-olds. "The girls think it's a girl, and the boys think it's a boy," she said. "Children of color think it's of color, Caucasians think it's Caucasian." Another system Cassell built spoke in what she termed "vernacular" to African-American children, achieving better results in teaching scientific concepts than when the computer spoke in standard English. When tutoring the children in a class presentation, however, "we wanted it to practice with them in 'proper English.' Standard American English is still the code of power, so we needed to develop an agent that would train them in code switching," she said. And, of course, there are regional issues to consider when creating a robotic voice. Many companies, such as Apple, have tweaked robotic voices for localized accents and jokes.

According to researchers in New Zealand, robot language may be imminent in the near future.