Kawasaki to Develop Motorcycles with Artificial Intelligence…and Emotion

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." If you've ever seen Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, you might think twice about putting your faith in machines with artificial intelligence. Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd. (KHI), however, is betting that the reality of artificial intelligence--or AI--will be not only benign, but a boon to the motorcycling experience. Kawasaki says it plans to develop "next-generation motorcycles that can grow along with the rider" using a combination of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) and AI (Artificial Intelligence). These motorcycles of the future will use something called the Emotion Generation Engine and Natural Language Dialogue System, said to be "a form of artificial intelligence that enables man and machine to communicate with technology capable of recognizing emotion by the sound of the speaker's voice," using a platform being developed by cocoro SB Corp., a member of the SoftBank Group.