Slovakia Today, English Language Current Affairs Programme from Slovak Radio

Computers running Artificial Intelligence software can now engage in human-like spoken conversation, and are quickly "learning" how to express natural human emotions, and even to "read" the emotions of the person they're speaking with. But could such an "intelligent machine" ever really develop emotions of its own? Stefan Benus, a researcher in Linguistics at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra and at the Slovak Academy of Sciences who has been working closely with the latest voice recognition and synthesis systems, has his doubts. RERUN: 20 year-old Oliver Scott, a journalism student at the University of Southern California, travelled to Bratislava in August to attend Comenius University's 3-week Summer School of Slovak Language and Culture. Why did he travel so far to spend his summer holiday in the heat of Bratislava, studying a language which almost no one in California uses?