Hello and welcome to a special pre-recorded episode of The Naked Scientists which is being

recorded on location here at the Cambridge Science Center.

This month we're exploring the world of robotics,

including robots that recognize speech,

robots that can move test tubes and samples around in laboratories and even robots that can

conquer other planets.

Conquering this planet though, scientists recently built the world's first robotic tractor,

bet you can't guess what it's called.

No, well it's a transformer. Of course exploring

Mars is something of a priority. We want to find the sunniest spots because the first

human colonists are going to be due there in the next 30 years or so, and those first pioneers

are predicted to be the world's intellectual elite.

The reason being, according to Space Authority Ali G, it's the well-read planet. Let's meet our team for you this week. From my left, please introduce

yourselves and say who you are and what you do. My name is Blaze Thompson and I used to be a research fellow at St John's just here in Cambridge

until a few months ago when I decided to join a startup company building voice interfaces for computers.

So I'm on the speech side of the panel and very interested in how computers can learn to understand language.

You know, as a medical doctor, Blaze, I've actually seen efforts to use computers to transcribe medical recordings in the past

and I've lost count of the numbers of patients I've seen described as circus sized and

also somebody who said that they were putting their patient on some phytoeestrogens

and it said that they were taking phytoestrogens, which are presumably dog vitamins.

Yes, well, I'm sure that's just because they weren't using our system of course, but that's actually a very big problem.

One of the best ways to get speech recognition to work is to assume that people are saying things that are commonly said,

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