{"id":1919,"date":"2026-03-06T09:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T14:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techy44.okdiario.com\/en\/?p=1919"},"modified":"2026-03-06T10:32:57","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T15:32:57","slug":"they-programmed-a-robot-to-watch-youtube-for-hours-and-what-it-learned-wasnt-programmed-into-it-its-a-bit-dizzying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techy44.okdiario.com\/en\/they-programmed-a-robot-to-watch-youtube-for-hours-and-what-it-learned-wasnt-programmed-into-it-its-a-bit-dizzying\/1919\/","title":{"rendered":"They programmed a robot to watch YouTube for hours\u2026 and what it learned wasn’t programmed into it (it’s a bit dizzying)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A soft faced humanoid robot has learned to move its lips in sync with speech and song simply by watching people talk on video and studying its own reflection in a mirror. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The machine, called EMO, was built at Columbia Engineering and is at the center of a new study showing thatrobots can pick up complex speech related gestures through observation instead of hand written code. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work, which appears in the journal Science <\/a>Robotics, points to a future where robot conversations feel far less stiff and cartoonish than they do today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The work, which appears in the journal Science Robotics, points to a future where robot conversations feel far less stiff and cartoonish than they do today. The work, which appears in the journal Science Robotics, points to a future where robot conversations feel far less stiff and cartoonish than they do today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work, which appears in the journal Science Robotics, points to a future where robot conversations feel far less stiff and cartoonish than they do today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why faces and lips matter in conversation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you have ever found yourself staring at someone\u2019s mouth while they speak, you are not alone. Eye tracking studies suggest humans devote a notable share of their attention to lips and lower face during conversation, which is one reason clumsy mouth motion makes many robots feel unsettling. EMO tries to solve that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its silicone face is driven by 26 tiny motors that can pull and push the lips with fine control, more like human muscle than the rigid jaws seen on many social robots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How EMO trained itself using a mirror and YouTube<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Training started with a kind of robotic mirror play. Engineers sat EMO in front of a reflective surface and let it fire off thousands of random expressions while a vision to action model learned how different motor patterns produced different mouth shapes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Once the system understood its own face, the team fed it hours of talking and singing clips on YouTube. By matching the sounds it heard with the lip positions it saw, the robot gradually learned to turn raw audio into the right sequence of facial movements across ten different languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What people noticed in tests<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To find out whether people actually bought the effect, the researchers showed videos of EMO speaking to more than one thousand volunteers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Viewers compared three different control methods against a reference of ideal lip motion and chose the new vision to action approach in roughly sixty two percent of trials, far ahead of the simpler baselines that only tracked loudness or copied past examples. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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