INNER speech, where we talk to ourselves, helps us evaluate situations and make more-informed decisions. Now, a robot has been trained to speak aloud its inner decision-making process. Arianna Pipitone and Antonio Chella at the University of Palermo, Italy, programmed a robot named Pepper to mimic human cognitive processes and handle text-to-speech. This allowed it to voice its decision-making while doing a task. The researchers then asked Pepper to set a dinner table according to rules they had set. When instructed to put a napkin on a fork with inner speech enabled, Pepper asked itself what etiquette was needed, concluding the request went against the rules. It then asked the researchers if putting the napkin on the fork was the correct action. When told it was, Pepper said, "OK, I prefer to follow your desire," and explained how it would do this.
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