This post represents the beginning of two new elements of the site. The first is our new Japan category, because if you’re going to talk about anything related to technology or geekery, Japan is the Area 51 of doing unbelievable stuff with bits and bytes. In acknowledgement of that fact, the blog Gadget Helpline has a series called “Only in Japan,” because, seriously, no one else would do the amazing things the Japanese can do.
The second feature is Oh No, Mr. Roboto, which is ongoing coverage of the way the robot are slowly becoming human and will serve as an important historical chronicle once they take over the world and destroy all the humans. To start with, the Japanese are giving increasing power to robots, seemingly unaware of the calamitous I, Robot future that awaits. That being said, this latest development is super weird. It’s a robot that is singing atonally with a human voice. Well, that’s the theory anyway. I ask you: does this sound like any human being you know?
Nonetheless, the reality is that the robot mouth is actually working like an organ of the human body. As Gadget Helpline points out: “the robot mouth uses a microphone sensor to record and replicate, through the artificial muscles, the sounds it hears – this thing actually learns to imitate your voice!”
Americans could never handle an invention that looked like this one. We’re too juvenile. I mean, look at that thing. This is a country, I’ll remind you, where a university had to change its name from Beaver College because prospective students associated the word “beaver” with the female anatomy. Now that the school’s name is Arcadia, admissions have shot up into the stratosphere.
For more on Japan’s robot mouth, click here.