Teaching a robot dog its first words is similar to teaching a toddler to speak, Sony scientists have found.

They have been experimenting with a souped-up model of their popular robotic dog, Aibo, to find out how a robot like this can learn language. "The main thing that we have found, which of course any mother would be able to tell us, is that you need a lot of social interaction," said Luc Steel, of the Sony Computer Research Laboratory in Paris, France, and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, at Vrije University, Brussels. For the experiment, Professor Steel and his team used an Aibo with twice the normal brain capacity of the model in the shops, and used a state-of-the-art speech system. By teaching Aibo its first words from scratch, they were hoping to gain an insight into how children learn to associate objects with words and then attach certain meaning to those words. Three types of objects were used, a red ball, a yellow puppet called Smiley and a small Aibo imitation called Po-chi. The team then tried to teach Aibo about what each of these objects was called. So, an instructor would take the red ball and ask the Aibo what it was, then repeat the word ball. The robot dog would then store the image of the red ball and associate it with the word "ball".