The Takanishi Laboratory, at Waseda University, Japan, is home for many robotic projects, including a flutist I wrote about a while ago. Today, let's look at a talking robot, the Waseda Talker No. 4, or WT-4. This anthropomorphic talking robot was built to better understand how the human vocal mechanism creates speech. The WT-4 has 19 degrees of freedom (DOF) for lungs, vocal cords, tongue, lips, teeth, nasal cavity and soft palate. With its vocal cords, it can produce Japanese vowels that are similar to human ones. The next version, the WT-5, will have even more sophisticated vocal cords.

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