Researchers led by the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology in Italy are developing robots that evolve their own language.

The technology, dubbed Embedded and Communicating Agents, has allowed researchers at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratory in France to add a new level of intelligence to the AIBO dog.

The AIBOs learned to distinguish between objects and how to interact with them over the course of several hours or days. The curiosity system, or “metabrain,” continually forced the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks, and to give up on activities that did not appear to lead anywhere. This in turn led them to learn how to perform more complex tasks, an indication of an open-ended learning capability much like that of human children.

Also like children, the AIBOs initially started babbling aimlessly until two or more settled on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment, gradually building a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate.