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CT: The number of robots in our society is increasing rapidly. The number of service robots that interact with everyday people already outnumbers industrial robots. The easiest way to communicate with these service robots, such as Roomba or Nao, would be natural speech. But current speech recognition technology has not reached a level yet at which it would be easy to use. Often robots misunderstand words or are not able to make sense of them. Some researchers argue that speech recognition will never reach the level of humans.
Palm Inc. faced a similar problem with hand writing recognition for their handheld computers. They invented Graffiti, an artificial alphabet, that was easy to learn and easy for the computer to recognize.
ROILA takes a similar approach by offering an artificial language that is easy to learn for humans and easy to understand for robots. An artificial language as defined by the Oxford Encyclopedia is a language deliberately invented or constructed, especially as a means of communication in computing or information technology.
S: http://roila.org/about/ (last access: 21 March 2014)

N: 1. artificial (adj): late 14c., in the phrase artificial day “part of the day from sunrise to sunset,” from Old French artificial, from Latin artificialis “of or belonging to art,” from artificium. Meaning “made by man” (opposite of natural) is from early 15c. Applied to things that are not natural, whether real (artificial light) or not (artificial flowers). Artificial insemination dates from 1897. Artificial intelligence “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines” was coined in 1956.
language (n): late 13c., langage “words, what is said, conversation, talk,” from Old French langage (12c.), from Vulgar Latin linguaticum, from Latin lingua “tongue,” also “speech, language”. The form with -u- developed in Anglo-French. Meaning “a language” is from c.1300, also used in Middle English.
2. A natural language is an ordinary hereditary language, spoken by a group of individuals as their native tongue. An example of a natural language is English. Natural languages are mainly studied by linguists, even though philosophers and computer scientists also study language through the philosophy of language and through computational linguistics. The above definition excludes Esperanto from the set of natural languages, as well as all present or future computer languages. These languages are called artificial languages. A subclass of the artificial languages is that of machine languages which as the name implies, are used by a machine to code letters, numbers, instructions, and storage locations in such a way that a computer does not require any translation in order to function according to its coded instructions. Pascal, C++, and Prolog are examples of machine languages. Formal languages are also artificial languages. A formal language, put simply, is a set of symbols that is accompanied by rules for concatenating the symbols into sequences. The special notation used in describing a game of chess is an example of a formal language, as are languages used to calculate in logic or mathematics. In computer science the ability of various formal languages to reflect the subtleties in descriptions of natural language is carefully studied, especially within the fields of conceptual modelling, database theory, and software engineering. Interest here lies mainly in the expressive power of languages.
S: 1. OED – http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=language&searchmode=none (last access: 21 March 2014). 2. http://people.dsv.su.se/~vadim/cmnew/chapter2/ch2_20.htm (last access: 21 March 2014).

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CR: artificial intelligence, computer science, natural language.