Give Your parrot the freedom of the Open Road

If you had an African Grey Parrot that shrieked and screamed so often it was driving you to the brink of madness, what would you do?

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Micro Air Vehicles - AVs

Dr Gregory Parker, Micro Air Vehicle team leader, holds a small winged drone that resembles a dragonfly at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

The Micro Air Vehicles unit of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson AFB is developing small military drones, with the goal of making them so small that they resemble small birds and insects, including some that will have moving wings.

Picture: REUTERS

Robo-tailor stitches a jacket seam

Even if sewing isn't your strong point, chances are you could outperform most machines. Fabric needs to be carefully aligned and held with the right amount of tension during stitching, a task best suited for two human hands but now a one-armed robot, developed by a European project called Leapfrog, seems like it's up to the challenge. In this video, you can watch it slide up two joined pieces of cloth and successfully sew up a seam.

The arm, developed by German company Moll Automatische Nahsysteme, was initially designed to help doctors stitch up patients after surgery. Since then, it has also been used to sew car upholstery. It's a much faster worker than humans: a job that would take an experienced human 5 minutes to complete is finished up by this robot in just 20 seconds.

The robot is just one element of an automated production line being developed by Leapfrog to create a jacket. A pattern is first cut out by a computer-controlled cutting table before suction grippers transfer the pieces to a bespoke, shape-changing dummy. Then pins hold the fabric in place for the arm to sew it up.

Automatic Speech Recognition Software; Effectiveness

MOST of us talk to our computers, if only to curse them when a glitch destroys hours of work. Sadly the computer doesn't usually listen, but new kinds of software are being developed that make conversing with a computer rather more productive.

The longest established of these is automatic speech recognition (ASR), the technology that converts the spoken word to text. More recently it has been joined by subtler techniques that go beyond what you say, and analyse how you say it. Between them they could help us communicate more effectively in situations where face-to-face conversation is not possible.

ASR has come a long way since 1964, when visitors to the World's Fair in New York were wowed by a device called the IBM Shoebox, which performed simple arithmetic calculations in response to voice commands. Yet people's perceptions of the usefulness of ASR have, if anything, diminished.

"State-of-the-art ASR has an error rate of 30 to 35 per cent," says Simon Tucker at the University of Sheffield, UK, "and that's just very annoying." Its shortcomings are highlighted by the plethora of web pages poking fun at some of the mistakes made by Google Voice, which turns voicemail messages into text.

What's more, even when ASR gets it right the results can be unsatisfactory, as simply transcribing what someone says often makes for awkward reading. People's speech can be peppered with repetition, or sentences that just tail off.

"Even if you had perfect transcription of the words, it's often the case that you still couldn't tell what was going on," says Alex Pentland, who directs the Human Dynamics Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "People's language use is very indirect and idiomatic," he points out.

Despite these limitations, ASR has its uses, says Tucker. With colleagues at Sheffield and Steve Whittaker at IBM Research in Almaden, California, he has developed a system called Catchup, designed to summarise in almost real time what has been said at a business meeting so the latecomers can... well, catch up with what they missed. Catchup is able to identify the important words and phrases in an ASR transcript and edit out the unimportant ones.

It does so by using the frequency with which a word appears as an indicator of its importance, having first ruled out a "stop list" of very common words. It leaves the text surrounding the important words in place to put them in context, and removes the rest.

A key feature of Catchup is that it then presents the result in audio form, so the latecomer hears a spoken summary rather than having to plough through a transcript. "It provides a much better user experience," says Tucker.

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