Bionic Voice Revolution

 

Following an exciting development by our Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience team in the field of bionics, MARCS Institute researchers have made a landmark discovery that will revolutionise the gold standard of care for laryngectomy patients. Bionic Voice is an electronic prosthesis for patients who lose their larynx due to cancer. It functions as an artificial larynx for these patients to restore their missing voice. Bionics is the science of replacing an amputated limb of the body with an electronic prosthesis.

Latest News And Events

Click Languages, Uniquely African ... and Australian!
What do Nelson Mandela and the Black Panther King of Wakanda have in common?
Bionic Voice Revolutionises the Gold Standard of Care
Imagine life without a voice. Around 300,000 people world-wide have had their larynx surgically removed as a result of cancer treatment, and the number is increasing by 10,000 every year.
Evolution of the Australian Accent
Australia Day; it’s snags on the barbie, mozzies, long necks, Akubra hats and that all Aussie sun blazing through our SPF 50+. But what is it that makes good ol’ Straya so unique? Well, it’s the accent of course.
Women; they just don't trust robots
Women are less likely to trust robots who stare at them.Research by Dr Chris Stanton, a roboticist at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, (Western Sydney University) investigated if the same physical elements that made humans trust one another could be applied to robotics.
AusE Babies trump peers at word learning
New research has found that Australian babies fare better than babies of other English speaking countries at word learning.
        
The Conversation: We all need to forget, even robots

17 August 2017

We all know what it’s like to forget something. A loved one’s birthday. A childhood memory. Even people capable of extraordinary memory feats – say, memorising the order of a deck of cards in less than 20 seconds – will still forget where they left their keys. People, it seems, are never in complete control of their memories.

Forgetting is a tricky business, both for humans and for artificial intelligence (AI), and researchers are exploring the idea of robot memory in many different ways.

Featured Publications

Early development of abstract language knowledge: evidence from perception–production transfer of birth-language memory
Children adopted early in life into another linguistic community typically forget their birth language but retain, unaware, relevant linguistic knowledge that may facilitate (re)learning of birth language patterns.
The origins of babytalk: smiling, teaching or social convergence?
When addressing their young infants, parents systematically modify their speech. Such infant directed speech contains exaggerated vowel formants, which have been proposed to foster language development via articulation of more distinct speech sounds. Here, this assumption is rigorously tested using both acoustic and, for the first time, fine-grained articulatory measures.