I got one of those audiobooks of the year’s best science fiction. It had a story in it I liked a lot. Now that I look at this cartoon, I think I liked it more than I realized.
In it, a computer programmer had given her sister a beta-version language translation software suite that was ramped up to account for the fact that her sister communicated in a couple of different Sign Languages. The software would translate sign, and whatever other languages it could recognize, or learn, and display a CGI avatar of the person with a synth voice as though it were speaking American English aloud.
All well and good until, through a series of domestic vagaries, the woman’s daughter finds herself going through interminable conversations with someone while the computer flounders to understand the language of the caller involved. The avatar would repeat “Hello” and “I’m hungry”, but the caller never seemed to understand the responses.
Finally over days, the computer breaks the language and conversations get a little better. And, in the end, as you’ve possibly guessed, the avatar had been randomly assigned to a pet crow. The augmented and advanced language software worked like crazy to understand and translate a language, but the avatar imaging software was only concerned with making lips match American English words, and didn’t have a setting for ‘non-human’ face.
Good story.
You can communicate across species barriers. Whether it’s a verbal or non verbal language.
Hubris hopefully scared the brown and yellow out of Lowell with that move, especially since he probably knows that raccoon well. So, Hubie has a roomie now? He’d make a great mascot…
Next, Hubris teaches him how to make fire, and how can openers work…
The real question, though, is if he learns how to sign a waiver before the fest starts.
I think the raccoon knows how to do both, already. Anyway, we should be concerned about Pookie went in the last panel. Power of invisibility could be a useful thing.
DON’T EVER UNDERESTIMATE RACCOONS.
they already know and a LOT much.
well, first step Hubris you give the raccoon food.
then you see how you can share the moment with someone on live camera to hear the screams and share the laughs. hehe
If you’re ever in the hospital and bored, here’s a fun thing to do: when your room phone (not your cell phone) rings and the caller asks for someone you don’t know, say something like “Oh, he died last night. I’m in this room now.”
bettting from the reaction of the computer voice. lowel is on the computer screen. and just had a reunion with his old friend the racoon
Cruelty.. The Boredom crusher!!
(*Pops a Mentos*)
…and chugs a diet coke?
I read that story when it was first published in the Microsoft anthology! It’s why I read anything there at all – McGuire is one of my favourite authors.