ASIMO Can Now Judge Rock-Paper-Scissors Contests

Honda’s ASIMO robot has just taken a small step for a robot but a giant leap for robot-kind. It can now understand three shouting voices simultaneously. Now, what would you do if you could understand three voices at the same time? Exactly! Judge Rock-Paper-Scissors contests!

The voice-recognition software that allows ASIMO to distinguish between the voices is called HARK. To detect and isolate where the voices are coming from, 8 microphones are used. Then, the software crunches the data and tries to take out a single voice where it is sent to be decoded.

This new software is incredibly important for ASIMO’s Rock-Paper-Scissors aspirations. Without it, the voice-recognition software would be overloaded. Any background noise is automatically ignored so that the voice-recognition software only has to contend with the voices.

ASIMO’s handlers are using it to judge Rock-Paper-Scissors games because of its limited vocabulary, since there are only 3 words that ASIMO needs to listen to (“rock,” “paper,” and “scissors,” duh!). While judging, ASIMO correctly identifies 70-80% of the words. Unfortunately, ASIMO can’t do much more than that. When 3 people shouted restaurant orders, its accuracy plummeted to 30-40%.

How does this affect us gamers, you might ask? Imagine applying this technology to Ventrilo, or Xbox Live–or even our brains. Everyone has had an encounter with someone who has an extremely high voice, or someone with a fan going in the background (it’s like having a hole being drilled into your ear). This software could be set to ignore noise and only send you the stuff that matters–speech. While there is no plan to extend this technology to gaming yet, I think that it could be extremely useful in the future.