The Power of Babble

MIT researcher Deb Roy is videotaping every waking minute of his infant son's first 3 years of life. His ultimate goal: teach a robot to talk.

Roy, 38, directs the Media Lab's Cognitive Machines Group, known for teaching remedial English to a robot named Ripley. By recording the early stages of his boy's life, Roy is seeking to supplement his steel-and-silicon investigations: His three-year-long study will document practically every utterance his young son makes, from the first gurglings of infancy through the ad hoc eloquence of toddlerdom, in an unprecedented effort to chart—uninterrupted—the entire course of early language acquisition. The goal of the Human Speechome Project, as he boldly calls his program, is to amass a huge and intricate database on a fundamental human phenomenon. Roy believes the Speechome Project will, in turn, unlock the secrets of teaching robots to understand and manipulate language.

Read full story in Wired.