Talking Robot and the Analysis of Autonomous Voice Acquisition

A talking and singing robot which adaptively learns the vocalization skill by an auditory feedback learning is being developed. In vocalization, the vibration of vocal cords generates a source sound, and then the sound wave is led to a vocal tract, which works as a resonance filter to determine the spectrum envelope. The robot consists of motor-controlled vocal organs such as vocal cords, a vocal tract and a nasal cavity to generate a natural voice imitating a human vocalization. The paper briefly introduces the construction of vocal cords and vocal tract for the realization of the talking robot, and then describes how the robot autonomously acquires the vocalization skill in the auditory feedback learning by listening to human talking and singing voices. The acquired voices were evaluated by listening experiments