General Intelligence
The U.S. Military Is Building Voice-Controlled War Robots
And unlike Siri, they’ll be able to understand the speaker’s ‘intent’
Welcome to General Intelligence, OneZero’s weekly dive into the A.I. news and research that matters.
War robots today take just too much darn time to control. I know it, you know it, and the U.S. Army knows it.
That’s why its research branch is cooking up a system that would allow soldiers to give orders to small robotic cars by speaking naturally, as opposed to using specific commands. The robots would be able to understand the soldiers’ intent and complete the given task, according to an Army press release. The system would be used for scouting out areas and search-and-rescue.
But there’s reason to be skeptical: The Army claims that robots with this system would be able to understand the operator’s intent, but that could misfire, literally.
Intent recognition has become a standard part of any chatbot, the most similar technology to what the Army is trying to create. These bots are trained on common questions or phrases, which are matched with a specific intent. For instance, “call a cab,” “get me a car,” and “taxi,” would all be tied to the command for Siri to open the…
