Ninjas have made made a real talking robot that sounds like a human…

We developed WT-7RII(Waseda Talker No. 7 Refined II) in 2009, which have human-like speech production mechanism. WT-7RII are consisted of the mechanical models of the lung, the vocal cords, the tongue, the jaw, the palate, the velum, the nasal cavity and the lips. These mechanical models are designed based on human and they have same size as adult male of human to have similar acoustic characters. The mechanism have 1 DOF(Degrees Of Freedom) in the lungs, 5 DOF in the vocal cord model, 1 DOF in the jaw model, 7 DOF in the tongue model, 1 DOF in the velum model and 5 DOF in the lips model: the total DOF is 20.