Whistling to machines

Urko Esnaola

Tim Smithers

pp. 198-226

in: Yang Cai, Julio Abascal (eds), Ambient intelligence in everyday life, Berlin, Springer, 2006

Abstract

The classical approach to improve human-machine interaction is to make machines seem more like us. One very common way of doing this is to try to make them able to use Human Natural Languages. The trouble is that current speech understanding techniques do not work well in uncontrolled and noisy environments, such as the ones we live and work in. Nor do these attempts mean that the machines use our languages in the way we do: they typically don't speak much like we do, and we mostly have to speak to them in special unnatural ways for them to be able to understand. Rather than require people to adapt how they speak to machines, so that the machines can understand them, we present a simple artificial language, based upon musical notes, that can be learned and whistled easily by most people, and so used for simple communication with robots and other kinds of machines that we use in our everyday environments.