Meet Anton, an animatronic tongue. It's made of soft silicone and was created by scientists at the University of Sheffield, UK, to help them understand speech and improve speech-recognition software without having to attach electrodes to human tongues.

While Anton isn't the first robot tongue, the hope is that it will help researchers better understand how the mouth produces sound, allowing them to create algorithms that can simply recognize speech patterns rather than try to match recordings to recordings.

As far as the deaf community is concerned, any improvement in speech recognition is a good thing, because this will lead to (better) automatic speech recognition. In other words, captioning, relay calls, and other services will benefit. Unfortunately, in terms of this particular research project, the jury is still out on whether it will help develop better speech recognition.

When asked if Anton could be used to help with speech therapy, Joseph Perkell, Ph.D., D.M.D., Senior Research Scientist, Speech Communication Group, Research Laboratory of Electronics and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, expressed his opinions. "This mechanical artificial tongue appears to be an impressive feat of engineering," he said. "It may help a little in understanding how people talk, but I'm not sure how. I can't be sure, but suspect it won't contribute all that much compared to other methods that are in use."

Dr. Perkell said it may help slightly as a therapy device, but there's a long history of attempts to use visual information about tongue movements. This information doesn't seem to help people very much with the intricate and complicated process of producing speech sounds in rapid sequences as we do with production of words and sentences. He also pointed out that there have been computer animations of tongue movements, which might well provide similar kinds of visual information.

When I viewed a video of Anton, I had the same reaction as Dr. Perkell: "While the device seems to be impressive, I'm not sure that it has the extraordinary ability of an actual human tongue, as used in speech production," he said. As a lipreader, I wasn't too impressed with Anton, myself.

Alas, this is yet another example of something that could potentially help the deaf community but falls short. I'm not going to volunteer to have electrodes attached to my tongue -- I think I'll go for an ice cream instead. My tongue will get a work out, but it will be a whole lot happier.

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