This awesomely creepy mechanical talking robot mouth, developed by the Sawada Group at Kagawa University, features speech organs which imitate a human’s.

The robot’s mouth and tongue are made from silicone rubber. The inside of the nose is made of plaster, which give it similar characteristics to the human nose.

The robot can ‘listen’ to the sounds that it makes and learn through feedback to make more ‘human’ sounds. 

“We’ve given the robot the score for the song Kagome, kagome. It’s already learned how to make the sound “ka,” and it’ll retrieve that information from its brain,” notes Professor Sawada of Kagawa University. “The robot’s also learned how to change a sound’s pitch by changing the air flow, so it’ll retrieve that data. In other words, it’ll use the information already in its brain to make sounds, while estimating speech movements based on the score. So all we are giving it is the words and the pitch.”

Note: The next step to make the voice sound more realistic is to add teeth. Ewwww.

via Diginfonews