From Talking and Listening Robots to Intelligent Communicative Machines

It is a popular view that the future will be inhabited by intelligent talking and listening robots with whom we shall converse using the full palette of linguistic expression available to us as human beings. Of course, recent technical and engineering developments such as Siri would appear to suggest that important steps are being made in that direction – and indeed they are. However, it is argued here that we need to go far beyond our current capabilities and understanding towards a more integrated perspective; simply interfacing state-of-the-art speech technology with a state-of-the-art robot is very unlikely to lead to effective human-robot interaction. We need to move from developing robots that simply talk and listen to evolving intelligent communicative machines that are capable of truly understanding human behavior, and this means that we need to look beyond speech, beyond words, beyond meaning, beyond communication, beyond dialog and beyond one-off interactions.