Asimo, Honda's humanoid robot, can now distinguish three different people shouting through one another perfectly. Asimo distinguishes (the direction of the) voices with eight microphones that have been set up in the matrix on the head and body of Asimo. Currently the three test subjects are solely shouting their name, but scientists except that Asimo will be able to handle more complex sentences and even more people in future.Being able to concentrate on one voice is known as the ‘cocktail party effect’. The ability to focus on multiple voices at the same time is now called the ‘prince Shotoku Effect’ after a Japanese legend in which prince Shotoku manages to listen to multiple people at the same time.
Future Vision by Erwin Van Lun on this article
And so laboratories develop techniques, robots that can communicate more intelligently than we can. Although it will take a while before robots enter our lives, it’s easy to picture that a Nintendo Wii with a similar built-in function can detect the speech comments of different people and develop a great game around that. We can shout what we want, the noise makes everything unintelligible, but the game splits it up effortlessly.