Acapela speaks for Philip K Dick Robot, a Hanson Robotics production.

Hanson's robots simulate full conversation using deep natural language including ASR, face recognising computer vision and Acapela text to speech. These robots are gaining worldwide media attention for their use as art, entertainment, education, advertising and advanced artificial intelligence research.

Acapela Ryan voice speaking out loud for PK-D android.

In an unparalleled technical collaboration, a team of artists, writers, engineers, literary scholars, and freethinkers are creating a lifelike, android portrait of one of America's well-known science-fiction writers Philip K. Dick. The robot will be featured at WIRED magazine's NextFest, June 25-27, 2005.

The late Philip K. Dick created the fiction behind Blade Runner, Minority Report and Total Recall. In addition, Dick wrote A Scanner Darkly, which will come out as a major feature film this fall. Hanson Robotics Inc (HRI), the FedEx Institute of Technology's Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS) and the Automation and Robotics Research Institute (ARRI) at UTA are working with Paul Williams, a close friend and former literary executor of Dick, to create a robotic portrait that will be a powerful memorial to the author.

The robot will portray Philip K. Dick in both form and intellect through an artificial-intelligence-driven personality. The hardware will manipulate Hanson's proprietary lifelike skin material to affect extremely realistic expressions with very low power. Cameras in the eyes will allow the robot to perceive people's identity and behavior through advanced machine vision and biometric-identification software. The robot will track faces, perceive facial expressions, and recognize people from the crowd (family, friends, celebrities, etc).

The visual data will be fused with some of the best speech technologies in the world. All of this will run in sync with Hanson Robotics' highly expressive robot face to emulate a full human-conversational system. Acapela high quality text to speech will actively contribute to make this robot alive, giving it the say in the most natural way.
"Acapela outstanding synthetic voices make our human-like robot seem very natural and human, completing the illusion of intelligent social presence, and marvelously so." said David Hanson, CEO and founder of Hanson Robotics Inc.

Hanson Robotics is rendering the mechanical and animation systems of the Philip K. Dick robot. Hanson's distinguished human-like face technology has been featured in Science, WIRED, the NY Times, CNN, and other prominent venues (see: www.human-robot.org). IIS brings its renowned expertise for AI and natural language systems as featured in WIRED, AI Magazine, as well as other well-known periodicals (see: www.fedex.memphis.edu and www.iismemphis.org). ARRI's premier mechanical engineering expertise ensures the project encompasses cutting edge robotics (see: ARRI.uta.edu).