Military takes robot interaction to the next damn level with new speech recognition system

Waking up Alexa or Google with a question works well enough in the relatively unchanging home environment. But when trying to control robots in a combat environment, asking Alexa politely to find the source of enemy fire is a whole different challenge. That's why U.S. Army and academic researchers joined forces to develop a better way to interact and control autonomous systems such as mobile robots. Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory (ARL), in collaboration with the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, developed a new conversational model called the Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface (JUDI) capability. The approach to speech recognition "enables bi-directional conversational interactions between soldiers and autonomous systems," according to a statement from the U.S. Army.