Pepper the robot delivers a speech accented with hand gestures learned from TED videos ETRI

We say a lot with our hands. We spread them wide to indicate size, stab the air for emphasis and reach out to draw people in. Waving our hands about when we speak makes us appear less robotic – and that’s true for robots too.

Youngwoo Yoon at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon, Korea, and his colleagues trained a machine learning system to match hand gestures to different words and phrases by showing it 52 hours of TED talks taken from 1295 …