Robot taught table etiquette can explain why it won't follow the rules

We use what is known as inner speech, where we talk to ourselves, to evaluate situations and make more-informed decisions. Now, a robot has been trained to speak aloud its inner decision-making process, giving us a view of how it prioritises competing demands. Arianna Pipitone and Antonio Chella at the University of Palermo, Italy, programmed a humanoid robot named Pepper, made by SoftBank Robotics in Japan, with software that models human cognitive processes, as well as a text-to-speech processor. This allowed Pepper to voice its decision-making process while completing a task. "With inner speech, we can better understand what the robot wants to do and what its plan is," says Chella.