This weird looking chap is the Waseda Talker-7 robot, and it makes those strange vowel sounds not through a loudspeaker, but a biomechanical simulation of the way we humans speak. To that end, it’s ...

Researchers at Columbia University published a study (via Science) in January 2026 that details their methods for getting a humanoid robot to look and sound a lot more like a person. They got it to ...