The Talking Heads are robotic agents running on a computer, looking at the world through digital cameras. Together, they play language games.

One agent looks at a scene, selects an object in the scene, picks some distinctive characteristics of that object (relative to other objects in the same scene) and says a word that represents one or more of those characteristics.

The other agent tries to interpret this word in order to guess what is meant by the speaker.

Over the course of a series of games, the Talking Heads build a shared lexicon to talk about the objects in the scene.