Shadowing Practice: Why robots still can't pick strawberries - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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I mostly stayed in cheap hotels just off the motorway on my road trip.
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But three times, because there was nowhere else nearby, I stayed in places that I would describe as fancy.
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And at breakfast, every one of them served Tiptree jam.
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I took photos because I knew where I was going later in the trip, when I reached the southeast and the county of Essex.
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This is not an advert, by the way.
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My producers reached out to Tiptree, or officially Wilkin & Sons Ltd, and they jumped at the chance to show off their strawberries,
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their robots, and what they called their fourth -generation growing system.
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Also, their royal warrant, because they are the jam and preserve supplier to the king.
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We're not even going to look inside the jam factory itself.
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This is a story about mechanization and infrastructure, and why it's really difficult for a robot to pick strawberries.
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Hi, Future Tom here.
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The Visit Tiptree was filmed last year on my big road trip, and obviously AI has moved at an incredible pace since then.
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But as far as I can tell, even now, no company has developed a machine that can pick strawberries faster and cheaper than humans.
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There are a lot of tech demos from years ago, some machines that work under test conditions, and marketing blurb and puff pieces that mention trials with prospective customers.
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But I couldn't find any evidence of machines working at commercial scale in the real world.
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And from what I learned at Tiptree, I think that'll still be true for a while if I'm wrong about that, then AI really will have changed everything.
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Also, given the pace of AI, if you're thinking of changing job or career, this video's sponsor, 80 ,000 Hours, might be able to help you.
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More on them later.
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Anyway, please enjoy this hopefully still relevant video of a city boy repeatedly finding out that, to quote Destin from Smarter Every Day, farmers are geniuses.
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So, I parked up outside Tiptrees HQ.
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The air smelled sweet, like sugar and oranges, and I got a tour around with Andre, the manager of the farm, who's been working there for more than 20 years.
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First question, I assumed that in the 21st century, a jam manufacturer would buy in their fruit,
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because growing fruit and preserving it are two very different skill sets.
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They started with farming, initially all cereal crops, and ventured into fruiting around 160 years ago.
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And when they made that fruiting site success, they were only selling the fruit to the market in London.
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But it was a long way back then and everything was carted by horse and car.
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And by the time they reached London, the fruit was almost like, you know, at the end of the shelf life.
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So they decided to start the jamming operation on site.
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So 140 years is this year since we've been making jam on site.
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We were mostly there for the strawberries and the new technology, but we took a few diversions on the way.
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We went past the on -site solar farm and irrigation reservoirs.
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Essex is one of the driest places in England, so Tiptree have to keep as much water as possible to get them through the summer.
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And to contrast the modern technology with how fruits traditionally grown, we also stopped by the mulberry trees, the oldest orchard on the farm.
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So these are century -old minimum?
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Like, how old are they?
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Minimum.
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We believe 150, but we don't have a hard proof for that.
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We know they're over 100 years because we've got pictures and they look quite grown on the picture.
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So that's why...
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At least a 100 -year -old mulberry tree.
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At least a 100 -year -old mulberry tree.
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And you're still making preserves from it.
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Still making, yeah, still picking them and making mulberry jelly from them.
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Next to the mulberry trees was a fruit I'd never heard of, which surprised me.
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Look, OK, if it was in some other far -flung part of the world, but I'm in Essex.
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This is very unusual fruit for the UK.
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What on earth is this?
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This is Medlar, as you can see.
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Medlar?
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Medlar first has been brought by the Romans to UK.
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Oh, hello, ladybird.
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Let's get one without the ladybird in it.
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There we go.
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Medlar.
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Medlar used to be really well known.
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It turns out all over English literature, in Shakespeare's works, in the Canterbury Tales, although that's written in the 14th century in Middle English.
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So medlar was referred to by a very different name, open arse.
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Whatever you call it, it gets turned into medlar jelly, which is often more an ingredient than something that you'd want to eat on its own.
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The demand for it isn't high, so I asked, are those the actual fruits that will become medlar jelly?
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For medlar, this has been a very good year.
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So what we've got from our orchards, from our trees, it will be probably 100 % tip tree fruit.
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But in other years, when the yields are smaller, it depends on the spring and the flowering and the fruit,
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we may need to look further and go to our own, you know, neighbouring farmers around us and buy fruit for what we need.
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How is there a fruit I've never heard of in England?
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I just… It's very unusual.
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I feel like somewhere in the trivia bits of my brain, I should know fruit.
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Those are cultivated and harvested like you'd expect, with humans tending to the trees and humans picking the fruit.
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The next stop was for a much more popular crop, the strawberries, and the third -generation growing system.
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As we're coming now, on the left -hand side, we've got our UV robots.
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Huh.
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Strawberry were picked yesterday, so not many berries.
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Not many here.
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Oh, so yesterday there were humans up and down here.
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Humans up and down here, picking and everything, and not many left, but you still, you know, they start to ripen again.
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It was nearly the end of the strawberry season, at least for the ones grown inside the tunnels.
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This is open, so the control of weather, of the climate inside is limited, very little.
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The polytunnel is going to keep the rain away.
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It's going to act a little bit like a greenhouse, but not much when you've got open boats.
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It's literally acting as an umbrella, keeping the plants dry, basically.
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Beyond that, it's very little help on the plant.
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And that's why these fruits, as you can see, it's less left on the plant and everything.
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There's not much coming behind.
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So this was the third generation system.
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What does that actually mean?
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First generation would be plant the strawberries in the ground.
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Yeah, plant in the ground.
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Second generation?
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Second generation ridge bed.
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We were, you know, raising earth by pushing it together and covered with mulch, and putting irrigation to the middle,
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a tape for irrigating and concentrating the roots on.
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And of course, the third generation getting them up in the air like this.
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That's not going to be cheap.
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Sure, there's going to be less back strain for the people picking them, but there's got to be other reasons to lift strawberries up into the air, because there's perfectly good soil down on the ground.
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We stop applying herbicides, so we do not apply herbicides anymore.
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What's the difference in the soil in the pot versus the soil down on the ground
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that means you don't have to apply herbicide?
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So basically when your strawberries are on the ground, you can see they're falling down, the grass is growing through and everything,
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so you have to keep it cleaner around to not get the fungus and disease on the berries.
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Oh, right.
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So you have to keep almost, you know, have to keep the grass non -existent.
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Otherwise grass puts vapour humidity around the plant and everything,
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and that way you get more problems disease -wise.
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Whereas that's just soil, that's just potted, I don't say clean soil, because soil isn't clean, it should have some stuff in it, but it's...
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It's a substrate, it's actually the stuff
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which is in here it's not soil it's not soil it's a coconut husk crushed coconut crushed coconut husk yeah huh
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and it's acting just as a material which retains a little bit of moisture
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and also the root is growing very very well in that
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because it's nice and fluffy and
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if i squeeze it oh right it's like a sponge
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and now it's almost dry you can wet it
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and dry it as you like and the coconut producers who are creating coconut milk
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and coconut water don't want the husk don't want the husk
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that was a waste product in country where the coconut grows
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and the industry very cleverly turned it into useful product
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which after use that can be spread on the ground and it acts as as an enhancer to the soil, basically.
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It lightens up the ground.
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Huh.
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So you don't have to use herbicide partly because you're not touching the ground, but partly because that's not soil.
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It doesn't have other seeds or grasses or weeds in it.
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There are other things to deal with apart from weeds, though.
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They also need an insecticide.
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Don't worry if you're scared of creepy crawlies.
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I'm not going to show anything.
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Nowadays, applying biological control.
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So these are little spiders, which are put in the crop.
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You shake spiders over...
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Shake spiders and put them in the crop.
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You can bulk order spiders.
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Connect.
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It's a targeted predator for the things that attack strawberries.
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Technically, those bottles have predatory mites, which are arachnids but aren't spiders if you're being really pedantic.
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But close enough, it's tiny, tiny, tiny things with eight legs.
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Yes.
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Wow!
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So that way, another element from the pesticides is taken away.
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Did you have that bottle ready for this demonstration?
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Was that one?
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No, I didn't.
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You probably go around and you'll find more bottles.
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Andre didn't say that biological control is the only insecticide they use, just that the mites reduce how much they need.
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And I'm sure none of this is news to anyone who lives outside a city, but as someone whose hands are best suited for typing, that blew me away.
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Okay, so that's reducing herbicides and insecticides.
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What about fungicides?
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That's where the robot comes, so the UV -C robot comes.
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UV -C?
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Oh, that's not the name of the robot.
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That's UV light?
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It's a UV light?
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UV -C is the particularly dangerous ultraviolet light.
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Well, they're all dangerous.
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UV -A causes aging and some skin cancers.
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UV -B causes sunburn and more cancers.
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UV -C is usually blocked by the atmosphere, but it's the nasty stuff that comes from welding torches and art lamps, and it can give you severe burns and blindness.
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I did find being that close to UVC lights, even turned off, was a bit uncomfortable.
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The robot walks the corpse three times a week and does it at nighttime.
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Yes, because you can't have anyone near this when it's running.
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That's...
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You actually can if you have all the equipment needed.
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So you've got special glasses and shield, basically and as soon as you stay away from it with the special glasses, it's absolutely safe for the human.
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That is twice I've been confidently wrong so far, once about soil and once about UV light.
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Not just the safety, but also the reason they run it at night.
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It works better overnight.
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It works better overnight?
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The plant's defences are down, and scientifically the powdery mildew responds better when you do night -lend things.
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Huh.
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That voice from off -camera was Ella, an agricultural mechatronics technician from Antobot.
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This is your robots, then?
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Yeah, my companies, but yeah, I built them.
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I can get them to move for you and navigate.
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Yeah, go for it.
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Just don't turn the UV on.
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It's not too bad.
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If you just stand here, you'll be fine.
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Look, I've just read too many articles about concerts
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or events where someone used cheaper or mislabeled UVC bulbs instead of human -safe ones and nearly blinded people, OK?
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UV -C scares the hell out of me.
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But Ella is right, it would be fine from that distance.
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Later on they gave me a face shield and welder's cream so I could film the close -up shots.
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Can we follow it?
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Yeah, we can follow.
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The middle row, obviously, it goes slower because it's wider
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and they still need the same kind of exposure because we have set treatment protocols for how much UV the plants need.
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Yeah, we've been at Tiptree for three years now and we've just been scaling up and scaling up.
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We have roughly seven operational robots and we are here almost every night.
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This feels like a fairly simple job for a robot.
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I know there's going to be all sorts of real -world technical things, but you've got a LiDAR scanner, you've got the width detection, keep it going straight, keep it at a certain pace.
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Yeah, yeah, I mean, you make it sound so simple.
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Well, that's the thing, it always seems simple until you meet the real world.
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Yes, yes, exactly.
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The goal is to get to the point where they don't need operators on site.
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Someone can just sit at the base, making sure it's all fine, or even better, work on something else and only pay attention if the system warns them that something's wrong.
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With the new systems, with the new greenhouse we are building, we're making it much more easy for the robots to operate.
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That's our idea.
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It's not only the UV on this robot.
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The robots, they've got cameras as well they actually are taking pictures of
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every inch every every millimeter of the of the plant
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and the architecture of the plant
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and everything it gives you prediction for example it counts the
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buds counts the flowers counts the berries we use um like
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a really trained ai model to recognize each strawberry put a bounding box get the ripeness count
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and then ideally what we do is Obviously that runs overnight, and then by the morning we've produced a report
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and send it to the farmers
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and then they have a rough idea of the ripeness count and the yield prediction for that day.
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Yeah.
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So this is it.
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It's a little bit rough.
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It's all a work in progress still, but that's their plan.
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That's the third generation growing system.
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Let's go see the fourth, the new growing system, now ten years old and this was where it felt like we were moving from agriculture to infrastructure.
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We'll talk about that after the break.
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I talked earlier about folks who are looking to change job or career.
212
If you are wondering what to do with your life, 80 ,000 Hours is a non -profit that helps people find careers that are fulfilling and also do good in the world.
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And the thing that makes me most confident about them, if they're not sure about something, they'll say so.
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Their advice changes with the times, and they don't claim to have every answer.
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They want to help people.
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who want to do good.
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Join the mailing list and you'll get their free career guide.
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Good luck for the future, and for now, back to the strawberries.
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The fourth -generation growing system was inside a climate -controlled greenhouse.
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Everything carefully managed with row after row after row of strawberry plants suspended in mid -air.
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More plants per square meter, more plants per linear meter, and then, of course, better production.
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We've reduced the footprint in these structures by a third, comparing to just doing it in the soil.
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We've also increased the production season, so we're kind of starting to pick around May, and we finish here in November.
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I remember, when I was a kid, being taken a couple of times to a farm that offered pick -your -own strawberries, which guaranteed that they would be as fresh as possible,
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and also gave parents an excuse to let the kids run around and exhaust themselves.
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But those farms weren't open for more than a couple of months, maybe three months at most.
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Those strawberries are producing fruit for half the year.
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It goes from that into a flower like the white ones we've got there.
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Yeah.
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And then from the centre of the flower you get something like that coming out.
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That's the berry.
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There we go, there's the berry and that then grows into the red fruit that we, well, into the white fruit initially, and then just overhead, there we go,
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there's one just overhead there.
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And that will happen over and over again with the same plant, at least with these varieties of strawberries.
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You keep fruiting, keep fruiting, up until November time even, and then end of November, when the temperature drops, light level disappears and everything,
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The ripening process, it happens from whiteberry, from green slowly turning, you can see from the tip,
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to the shoulders, it takes more than like 10, 15 days.
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And by the time it ripens at the top, the tip is already soft, it's spoiled.
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So at that point you kind of give up and say you're done for the year.
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The ripening process has to go fast enough, Otherwise, you end up with a half -unripe, half -rotten strawberry.
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But still, six months to the year is pretty good.
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The best part of this greenhouse design, by the way, is the vertical rows, because I assumed that those positions were to allow access.
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You can pick one set of strawberries at chest height, and one by reaching up a little.
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Nope, Ron, it's far more clever than that.
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The lines can move up and down, and once we finish picking this line, we just press a button and they swap.
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No!
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Oh.
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They do?
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And I can demonstrate that.
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Yeah.
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It happens very slow.
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Those are all on winches.
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You're kidding me.
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There you go.
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So I've just put that side.
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Yeah.
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And they start moving.
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One line comes down.
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One line goes up.
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Every other line.
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Yes, they do.
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I mean, it's very slow.
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I'm hoping that's showing up on camera.
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but that one there is steadily descending the one behind it is going yeah they've swapped
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so i'm up there again like i'm going to try
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and just reach up to get this shot there is a whole rotating system basically can swap them over
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or turn them
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and that's this whole set then all the way down there yeah with one motor that's incredible that's so much weight Okay, how far does that go down?
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That's like 20, 30 metres down.
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That's 40 metres.
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40 metres.
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All of those rows, 40 metres long, all moving up and down.
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The wet substrate, the leaves, the fruit, everything, all of it can move.
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If you take from here to the next bay, it's about ten times per bay.
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It's a lot of weight, but it's done very cleverly.
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Right.
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Because you have one down, one up.
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They're done on counterbalance.
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You're not lifting.
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Neither you're dropping.
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You're just balancing.
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It's just rotating and balancing.
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Oh, that's clever.
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So basically the motors are doing very little work.
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They're only rotating.
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That's so clever.
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If you would like to do, you know, if you have an empty line and two full lines, then you have a problem.
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oh yes that's true okay or different varieties
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or different lot you have a problem but if you
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if you counterbalancing them then you're absolutely fine we were the first company in uk to bring the technology here
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and it was 10 years ago first of its kind in the country for strawberries So why not add more?
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Because there are vertical farms in the world, places that will add layer on layer on layer, a skyscraper of produce.
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With this system we're using every inch of the surface available for growing.
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That's the beauty of the whole system.
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Right.
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That's what I hadn't got until just now, which is that you can't add more than this because you're using literally all the sunlight.
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Yeah.
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So basically, this structure is using all the natural resources, like the sunlight and everything.
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We don't have any artificial lighting and everything.
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So that's why we cannot add any more we actually
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when we level the lines underneath is almost dark right cannot
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we initially we started here uh with 19 lines per bay
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but that was way too much the strawberry were close together
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they were touching when you offset them and everything
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and then slowly with kind of a space the mouth space enough to find the balance
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and that's where we've got them 12 lines almost per bay, and we kind of balance them very beautifully.
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What an operation.
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I'm just in awe of the scale of it.
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There's more infrastructure to make sure all the plants are watered evenly, a micro -irrigation system, sensors to turn the water pumps on and off,
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fancy soft pipes that drip specific amounts of water per hour, climate control that opens or closes the greenhouse windows, turns fans on and off,
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all of it fed back to a central monitoring system and thankfully, because I didn't want to be cheeky and ask, Andre offered me a strawberry.
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There's another couple of days before we start picking here, but hopefully I'll find something.
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There you go.
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So you have to.
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Look at that.
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So what variety did you say this was?
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This is Aurora Karima, or Karima we call it.
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Aurora Karima.
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The aroma, you can actually smell the aroma at this time of the year.
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Yeah, and you can eat it when you eat it.
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It's always like you have to have the best experience in terms of juiciness,
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flavor, and, you know, the perfect strawberry shape as well.
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That sometimes could be an issue, it depends on the, you know, on the temperatures and everything is combined.
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I'm so used to just supermarket strawberries that don't taste that good.
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That's incredible.
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I think that was the best strawberry I've ever tasted.
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Because there is continual research and development in farming, there are new varieties, new cultivars of strawberries.
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I looked up Aurora Karima.
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It was only developed in the last few years.
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Researchers crossbred existing varieties with the traits they want, using endless trial and error.
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Some cultivars will be optimised for hardiness, they don't bruise during transport or rot while they're on the way to supermarket shelves.
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Some will be optimised for size, so they look good.
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And some, maybe because they're going to the jam factory immediately after being picked, are optimised for long growing seasons and taste.
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I have never tasted a strawberry that good, and I swear this is not an advert.
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They always taste better straight from the plant.
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Right, of course they do, of course they do.
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Oh, thank you.
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You're very well.
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I'm going to go off and ask about the robots before I just try to eat every strawberry in here.
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That tastes so good.
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Which brings me to the strawberry -picking robots.
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Andre introduced me to Dr Vishu from the University of Essex, along with his colleague Daniel.
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They're developing a low -cost robot for strawberry -picking.
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And city -dweller here may not know much about agriculture or farming and may be easily impressed by modern farming techniques,
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but I do know a bit about computer vision and robot movement.
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And I know that this is one of the most difficult, repetitive tasks you could ask a robot to do.
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It's the first generation platform.
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It's called as the Beast.
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Okay.
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So first generation?
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First generation because we've already built a second generation
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which is a low -cost platform and the third generation is currently under development.
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So this one costs about £100 ,000.
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Okay.
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The third generation is a 10 times reduction in cost while retaining the precision and speed.
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Let's see the robot.
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Strawberry picking is a very complex task because it involves perception, the vision system, the action system, the decision making which berry to pick,
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soft interaction because we don't touch the berry, it's soft and easily damaged.
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These are all things that traditionally robots are not good at.
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Problem number one is just identifying a ripe strawberry.
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Every strawberry is different, so the colour, the shape, the size, the cluster in which it's coming in, there are occlusions because of leaves.
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Yeah, because problem number one is not identifying a strawberry, it's identifying a strawberry in the middle of a bush.
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And which is ripe and pickable.
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They've built a.. a deep learning model for it, which seemed like overkill to me, but I was wrong again, because it doesn't just have to identify the berry.
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That would be simple.
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It's the red thing.
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But it has to identify which stem belongs to that berry in three -dimensional space, work out if its clipper can reach it, and then go into position.
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So it's completely 3D printed, and there are a lot of other interesting things in the design like the stem holder
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because now it's too windy so even the berry moves the stem holder stabilizes the stem
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and there is a soft material here
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which basically holds the berry once it's cut this is something that's
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so easy for humans you can you just reach in with your hand
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and yeah and it comes off yeah so because we can't make contact
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and there is no additional sensing we don't put any camera or anything on the gripper, so this also reduces the cost of the system.
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I was going to ask why, because presumably the more data you have… We want to have the structure perform the function.
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Oh, that's a nice way of putting it.
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The design already gives it the capability to perform that interaction, hence reduces the computational overhead.
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There are other companies working on this, both in the UK and elsewhere.
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Some of those products are extremely expensive.
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One competitor's robot costs £30 ,000, requires a recurring subscription, and involves large amounts of custom -manufactured equipment.
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Others are very, very slow.
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And most of them don't seem to have cleared the awkward phase yet.
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This is going to try and pick strawberries now.
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Hopefully.
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Hopefully.
391
Not quite.
392
It did manage to pick strawberries quite well, sometimes. And...
393
Yes!
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Right now it's dropping, but now it's going to...
395
There will be a basket there, right?
396
Yes, there will be a basket, but now there is no berry, so it's searching, searching, searching, searching.
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OK, but, like, that...
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What startled me there is that it managed to move all of the other ones out the way.
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There was a whole cluster there.
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Yes.
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There was a whole...
402
So, OK, it's going to come in on this one here.
403
I think it should.
404
Oh!
405
Or it might try and stab itself.
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To be fair, once it got reset, it did get on a roll.
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It's fully autonomous, so, I mean, once you press it...
408
Oh, that's good.
409
That's spot on.
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Hey!
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I think it'll go for this one now.
412
Okay, that's a perfect straw video.
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That's a little high for it.
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It got it!
415
Okay, I...
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Now he's searching, searching, searching, searching, searching.
417
Yeah.
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I...
419
Uh...
420
It's actually good. That.. you...
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There is some damage...
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You shouldn't sound quite so surprised by that.
423
This is a really difficult task, and they're using off -the -shelf components.
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I think it likes this one.
425
It should pick this from my...
426
But can it?
427
Let's find out.
428
It is a bit close.
429
That's a bit close to me.
430
It does, yeah.
431
Yeah.
432
Spot on.
433
Spot on both the robot and they got that in focus, which was nice.
434
No, that's a tricky cluster.
435
I'm aware that the audience is going to see the robot fail a lot here.
436
Sometimes it's going to nail it, sometimes it's not.
437
I don't want to make this, oh, the robot doesn't work, because it clearly does sometimes and your job is to just...
438
Make it precise.
439
Make it precise enough.
440
I'm wary of saying that it will be a long time before a robot can pick strawberries to a human standard.
441
After all, four years ago, it was going to be a long time before a robot could write poetry.
442
Two years ago, it was going to be a long time before a robot could create realistic fake video.
443
But despite all that, it still seems like it should be a long time before picking strawberries better than humans is possible.
444
After all, humans can reach out and get immediate feedback and the nerves in our fingers.
445
There are companies working on that too, but the cost is immense.
446
And like, you could build all of those things into it, but then you have a million -pound robot that...
447
Yeah, yeah.
448
And touch is still not to the level that you can get precise feedback from it.
449
So haptics is a little bit too far away because we don't want to make any contact because these are very, very easily deformable.
450
Yeah.
451
If you squeeze in the wrong place, It just...
452
Just a little bit of force and the berry gets blemished.
453
In theory, a strawberry -picking robot would put humans out of work the same way
454
that every agricultural and mechanization advance has put humans out of work, or at least change what those jobs involve.
455
Farmers in England do struggle to recruit enough seasonal workers.
456
There aren't currently enough people to pick all the fruit.
457
That said, I think there's still a few growing seasons, at least, before the robots are going to be competitive.
458
Not quite.
459
Next time, or right now, on Nebula, But I fill in a gap in my map
460
and realize that I don't know nearly as much about clocks as I thought I did.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Why robots still can't pick strawberries”. This video has 397 sentences and 5129 words to shadow. The speech runs for 30:41. The speaker talks at a natural 167 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| strawberry noun | /ˈstɹɔˌbɛɹi/ | The sweet, usually red, edible accessory fruit of certain plants of the genus Fragaria. |
| robot noun | /ˈɹoʊ.bɑt/ | An intelligent mechanical being designed to look like a human or other creature, and usually made from metal. |
| berry noun | /ˈbɛɹi/ | A small succulent fruit, of any one of many varieties. |
| soil noun | /sɔɪl/ | A mixture of mineral particles and organic material, used to support plant growth. |
| coconut noun | /ˈkəʊ.kə.nʌt/ | A fruit of the coconut palm (not a true nut), Cocos nucifera, having a fibrous husk surrounding a large seed. |
| metre noun | /ˈmiːtəɹ/ | The basic unit of length in the International System of Units (SI: Système International d'Unités), equal to the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in… |
| spider noun | /ˈspaɪ̯dɚ/ | Any of various eight-legged, predatory arthropods, of the order Araneae, most of which spin webs to catch prey. |
| crop noun | /kɹɑp/ | A plant, grown for it, or its fruits or seeds, to be harvested as food, livestock fodder, or fuel or for any other economic purpose. |
| stem noun | /stɛm/ | The stock of a family; a race or generation of progenitors. |
| farmer noun | /ˈfɑɹ.mɚ/ | A person who works the land and/or who keeps livestock; anyone engaged in agriculture on a farm. |
| greenhouse noun | /ˈɡɹːnˌ(h)aʊs/ | A building used to grow plants, particularly one with large glass windows or plastic sheeting to trap heat from sunlight even in intemperate seasons or… |
| infrastructure noun | /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/ | An underlying base or foundation for a building, organization, or system. |
| layer noun | /ˈleɪ̯ɚ/ | A single thickness of some material covering a surface. |
| grass noun | /ɡɹɑːs/ | Any plant of the family Poaceae, characterized by leaves that arise from nodes in the stem and leaf bases that wrap around the stem, especially those grown as… |
| pace noun | /peɪs/ | A step taken with the foot. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| move up verb | To promote, put onto a higher level. | |
| close together adjective | Near each other in time or space. | |
| close up verb | /kləʊzˈʌp/ | To close (remove a gap) completely or fully. |
| come down verb | To descend, fall down, collapse. | |
| come off verb | To become detached. | |
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
| fall down verb | /fɔl ˈdaʊn/ | To fall to the ground. To collapse. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- And you’re still making preserves from it?
- You can bulk order spiders?
- Did you have that bottle ready for this demonstration?
- You’ll probably go around, and you’ll find more bottles.
- This is your robots, then?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | who's been working · we've been making · we've just been scaling |
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | If you just stand here, you'll be · if they're not sure about something, they'll say |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has moved · has developed · have changed |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was filmed · was carted · has been brought |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 116 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, you're, we've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: irrigation /ˌɪɹəˈɡeɪʃən/, unusual /ʌnˈjuːʒ(u)əl/, shake /ˈʃeɪk/, shield /ˈʃild/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, irrigation /ˌɪɹəˈɡeɪʃən/, unusual /ʌnˈjuːʒ(u)əl/, agriculture /ˈæɡ.ɹɪˌkʌl.t͡ʃɚ/, biological /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like strawberry, robot, berry.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.