I wanted to tell you guys to watch this without seeing the description, but it’s difficult to do so. Better find someone nearby, tell them to close their eyes, and then open them when they think they’ve got it figured out. This piano-based voice synthesizer breaks down the morphemes of normal speech into components which can be built up using piano keys. Sounds crazy in theory of course, but actually seeing the keys playing themselves and a voice coming out of it makes me think the end times are coming.

Will this be the voice with which our robot antagonists will soothe future generations of cowed humans?

[via Reddit]

We covered them all: Teaching robots, kissing robots, space robots, modeling robots and even sensitive robots. But Ninomiya-kun, a book-reading robot, is a new one. He might get along well with Booktime, a page-turning robot (just saying). And needless to say, all of these robots are Japanese.

Ninomiya-kun doesn’t read e-books, but those physical, paper-printed books. Standing 1m tall (weight: 25kg), he was showcased yesterday for the first time at a robot show in Southern Japan. The robot was jointly developed by two Japanese and one Chinese university.

Ninomiya-kun is able to read through a character recognition software installed on a PC that he carries in his backpack. His two camera eyes look at a book page and a voice synthesizer turns the text he “reads” into spoken language.

The robot is able to distinguish about 2,300 Japanese characters, which is the minimum amount the national school system expects Japanese people to learn at school.

Via Yomiuri Online [JP]