A robot just learned to move its lips like a human. By watching YouTube. Researchers at Columbia Engineering built a silicone faced robot called EMO with 26 tiny motors under its skin. They sat it in front of a mirror and let it experiment with thousands of facial expressions until it figured out how its own face worked. Then they showed it hours of YouTube videos of people talking and singing. No captions. No translations. No understanding of what the words meant. It just connected sound to mouth movement and started lip syncing in languages it was never trained on. When they tested it on 1,300+ people, the self taught approach beat every other method by a wide margin. We’re entering the era where robots learn the way we do. By watching. 📎 To learn more: 🔬 Search “Learning realistic lip motions for humanoid face robots” on Science Robotics ➡️Columbia Engineering “A Robot Learns to Lip Sync” 🔗 SciTechDaily “This Robot Learned to Talk by Watching Humans on YouTube” #tech #techexpl...