Disclaimer: this material contains only the subjective opinion of the author, filled with stereotypes and fiction. The facts in the material are displayed in the form of metaphors, metaphors can be distorted, exaggerated, embellished, or completely invented
ASM
Until now, there are disputes about who initiated all this. Yes, yes, I'm talking about how people switched from ordinary communication with people in human languages, to communication ... with animals 🙂
Some would say that it began as early as the 19th century, when a scholar described the general principles of such potential communication. And someone - that it started during the Second World War, when scientists studied ways of communication and began to use animals to intercept enemy messages or just to play chess with their pets (even though Bobik lost to the owner all the time, the process was still exciting for both). It’s not so important how it all started, it’s much more important what it all came to, but more about that in order
At first, there were quite a few people who knew how to communicate with animals, and this business was not so popular. Yes, it is clear - it's not for you to learn a human language. Here the approach to speech is completely different, and our intellect is different, and the sense of the world. Many things simply cannot be conveyed: how do you explain to a cow what red is if she does not distinguish it? And the sounds of many animals are not only difficult for us to pronounce, but even difficult to hear. Well, nothing, for the sake of science and progress, many daredevils took up the study and over the years have mastered this skill. Truly, nothing is too much for a man!
However, progress did not stop there. As always, people tend to make things easy for themselves. And here there were more than enough difficulties, which is only worth the fact that having studied the language of one animal, mastering the next one was not much easier. Some principles, of course, were transferred, but not all of them (new sounds, new features of thinking of different animals, etc.)
So they came up with the Automatic Morpheme Synthesizer, or, for simplicity, AFM. This device is small enough to fit in your pocket. For how useful! You set it up to work with a specific type of animal, press the buttons of the correct morphemes ... and it itself synthesizes the necessary sounds from them! No more learning pronunciation and breaking your tongue. Of course, you still need to understand the difference in the mentality of different animals. For example, you should not mention mice when talking to an elephant, it can scare them a lot. But in terms of pronunciation, everything has become much easier. And most importantly, craftsmen from all over the world can connect and add knowledge about the languages of other animals to this device, and then everyone can use this device to communicate with new animals. The learning process has become much easier and faster, and the number of people wishing to master this science has grown.
SI
Some time later, everyone was already only using the new invention, and almost everyone forgot about the direct pronunciation of sounds. The new generation immediately began to learn to communicate through ACM. Yes, they sometimes made unfortunate mistakes, and pressing the wrong button on the synthesizer brought the animal into embarrassment, if not completely enraged. Sometimes people were bitten and gored in response. But what can you do, anything can happen.
All in all, it was going pretty well, such a breakthrough expanded the possibilities of interspecies communication, but still it was still difficult to call this communication convenient. Judge for yourself: first study the work with AFM, then the peculiarities of thinking of different animals, in the process you will fill a bunch of cones and, possibly, kill a couple of animals, causing them to have a heart attack by inadvertently pressing the wrong button.
People understood this problem, and came up with a smarter synthesizer, or, as they called it, the Intelligent Synthesizer. The machine was already bigger, but it still easily fit in a backpack. For how many new opportunities it opened up! You could already type text in human language. Almost. The language was still somewhat clumsy, one had to speak in commands. So, instead of a simple “go get some slippers”, you had to write “turn back, forward 3 steps, if you see slippers, take it, if not, go further ...”, etc. For that, having described it once, you could call it “bring slippers”, and next time you should immediately write briefly and clearly. In short, you could call the terms convenient names for you, describe the processes ... yes, just a sea of \uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbopportunities! And there are also many defenses: it was already much more difficult to inaccurately lead an animal to death or simply to anger. But most importantly, the language was already understandable to almost anyone. Those. not only do you not need to study pronunciation, but in general you may not know how it all translates into animal language. Often it was not even necessary to know the details of how this or that animal thinks, the machine will already do many of these things for you.
It seemed that just about all the children would learn how to use the SI from school and it would be a universal tool for everyone!
New round
Over the following years, many different new machines have sprung up, each with its own additional features. What only Synthesizer ++ is worth, allowing you to do many things in different, more convenient ways for you. For example, you can type “bring beer” to a raccoon, or “bring beer”, and all this will be translated into the same speech understandable for a raccoon or a lemur. It was possible to explain the relationship between objects. For example, "the beer that's in the fridge," or describing "cider" as "beer, but from apples." Even the context-dependent meanings of words could change: you can write to the cat “get out of the room”, or you can say “get out of here”. The words are the same, but the meaning is different.
There are more opportunities, learning takes a little longer, but once you learn it, communication becomes fast and convenient. One problem is that the new generation rarely studied how everything works there and how exactly communication with animals goes. Of course, they are not up to it, there is not so much use from this as from studying new devices for communication. Why learn the old when something new comes every day?
All these new devices have greatly expanded the circle of people communicating with animals. Moreover, it has long outgrown only the scientific sphere. Now communication with animals was used both in production (it is very convenient to use foxes to protect crops from harmful moles), and for animal husbandry (cows could now graze themselves), and even just for entertainment (who said that you can’t play football with horses?).
And then it occurred to someone “why are we just writing ... let's talk!”. Existing devices worked quite well, so they were used to build new ones. Those. simply in front of an old text synthesizer, they put a microphone and a speech analyzer. He is on all the time, listens and ... for you, he types the necessary text on the synthesizer. Yes, it works much slower, because you always need to recognize speech on the go, even if you work with a recording ... for how much easier it is! You sit, put your hands behind your head, and communicate.
One such device was a device called Python. It is not clear whether the creator adored these snakes, or tried the tool on them for the first time, or what movie he watched about them the other day ... However, this is not important. The main thing is progress! The younger generation is again actively studying how to use new tools, completely rejecting the "grandfather's ways". Unless where speed is important, you have to work with printed texts. Otherwise imagine a game of football where the opponent hits the ball a minute after it hit his head?
JS
However, progress did not stand still, and after a while someone decided that communication should be very simple to learn, so that anyone could just pick up and speak. Why even strain your brain to think about simple things like “how to break it down into simple and understandable steps for an animal” when this time can be devoted to solving more important immediate problems!
So he came up with a device called Just Speak! (eng. "Just Speak!"). I came up with something, I even made a prototype in 10 days. But for his idea to work as he wanted, it took years. Many companies saw an economic benefit in this device: animal workers can be trained faster and cheaper! They helped by developing many different Just Speak devices.
The devices are large, about the size of a car. For that on wheels! And the dream came true - anyone could communicate with any animals in a fairly familiar language. You speak into the device, it analyzes, translates it into a set of text commands, and then into a long set of animal-friendly sounds, morphemes, and so on. It was slow at first, because the device was improved, many versions were made to improve performance. On the 8th version, it turned out to get a device fast enough for most tasks. There was no limit to the happiness of people: everyone began to communicate with animals, ask them to do something, teach them new and new things. Often even without a specific goal, but just to try and play around.
Companies have adopted this, and in most cases, more and more used this particular device for all their tasks. Many by this point simply could not find or train enough of the required personnel. And the most remarkable thing is that now it was impossible to kill an animal at all! Humane and economical! Even if you say something is wrong, the device will ignore it and will not say anything dangerous to the animal. Yes, sometimes this leads to the fact that instead of “bring fucking slippers”, the dog first smears the slippers, and then brings them. And sometimes he just thinks about what he said for half a day. But so what? For that, the dog did not refuse to obey the command, was not afraid and did not bite anyone!
Wrong turn
Communicating in this language has become easier and more enjoyable, especially in the early stages of learning. Almost immediately you could see how the animal understands you and does something in response. Simply magic!
But for real work, the ambiguous behavior caused a lot of problems for both the business and the workers themselves. It was impossible to remake the device much, because the whole world works on it, everyone knows how to communicate ... and why bother with bicycles? Therefore, we decided to simply add convenient assistant devices on top of it. Here you have a device that cleans your speech from obscenities, and a device that signals that your speech can be perceived in two ways, and a device that tests that you do not behave aggressively towards an animal. Yes, they are massive, the size of a house or high-rise building. But Just Speak itself is not small either.
But the main impetus for progress was that almost all of these devices were made based on the same Just Speak. Those. the device analyzed speech on the go, transmitted it to another device through speech synthesis, then transmitted it to a third ... and so it could all work. Yes, slowly. Yes, it did not always work properly in conjunction with other devices. But for this, the craftsmen made each their own version in order to correct the errors of previous devices. For any occasion, you can find and select the device you need in your particular case. The main thing is that everything works and saves money for corporations.
Yes, and progress does not stand still: now you can even add an additional device on top of JS, and this device allows you to communicate in a more streamlined language, in fact, with convenient commands. Those. the probability of ambiguity of the statement has decreased significantly. And if you say something wrong, the device gets scared and stops the process, issues an appropriate warning.
In a word - Progress!!!
Source: habr.com