AI Smackdown - Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

I already blogged about my Android phone—not the way a professional critic would, but in terms of what’s actually interesting about it, which to me is the Artificial Intelligence angle.  Actually, “artificial stupidity” was the point:  a phone playing dumb so it can play favorites.  I’ve also blogged a bit about AI in general, with Apple’s Siri agent as a case study, but that was before I had an iOS device.  Now, I own all three platforms:  Moto/Android; Siri; and Microsoft’s Cortana.  In this post I compare and contrast them: not because I’m going to help you choose, but to try to make you laugh.  And you might have something interesting to scratch your head about later.

(I’m not going to try to differentiate between the terms Google Now, Android, and Moto.  They all meld in my mind.  If somebody protests that there are massive differences, I won’t be offended if you go read his or her blog instead.)

Cortana

I’ll start with Cortana because it can be dispatched very quickly.  If you type something into the Cortana field in Windows 10, it does a Bing search.  Bing is a little bit like using a Curad bandage instead of a Band-Aid, or using Hunts ketchup instead of Heinz, or wearing Sears Toughskins jeans instead of Levi’s.  It just isn’t done.  I don’t actually care if Bing works just fine.  It’s Bing, which means it’s not Google. “Let me Bing that for you.”  Give me a break.

Moreover, before you can get into the voice recognition stuff, you have to deal with this frightening disclaimer:

Yes, I know all this meddlesome snooping is just to “tailor the experience,” but it’s the online equivalent of your tailor saying, “To get the fit right on these trousers, I’ll have to reach in and fondle your balls.”  The explicit information Windows wants to use is bad enough, but that wide-open phrase “and other information” is just over the top.

Besides, “Cortana” sounds like a new model of Hyundai.  You know what Microsoft?  It’s over.  You lost.  You’re just a PC software company.  Stop trying to act “mobile.”

Android/Moto

I won’t go into a lot of detail about how well my Android phone responds to voice commands, because a) I already did that, here; and b) as I describe the Siri experience, I’ll compare it to Android/Moto as I go.

The really lame thing about Siri

Imagine if, before engaging with a person, you had to go push a button on the person’s chest.  In most cases, this would be absurd.  (With my kids, who never hear my commands, it would actually be an improvement.)

I think it almost goes without saying that voice response is a minimum requirement for any kind of AI.  The Siri demo I watched way back in 2012 did feature voice activation on the iPhone.  But oddly enough, for the Siri voice response to work on the iPad, the iPad has to be plugged in to an electrical outlet.  That is just so bizarre!  I mean, the iPad’s portability is the whole point, isn’t it?  What’s next for Apple:  an iPhone you plug into an RJ-11 jack?  This is ridiculous.  If I’m sitting at a desk next to an electrical outlet, I might as well be using a laptop.

There’s something else really lame about the iPad:  a limitation that hasn’t existed on an Apple product since the Apple II computer.  But I’ll get into that later.  Better to keep you in suspense.

Siri voice response:  up to snuff?

In general, Siri tries to have a bit more personality than Moto.  For example, if I ask my Droid, “Do you love me?” it shows me a song called “Do you love me?” by the Contours.  (My younger daughter, who has not seen “Her,” put me up to asking this question.)  When I asked Siri if she loved me, she responded, “I respect you.”  And when (again at my daughter’s behest) I asked Siri, “Have you ever gone to the bathroom?” she replied, “Who, me?”

Is this cheekiness a good thing?  Well, Siri’s responses may strike you as funnier that Moto’s.  On the other hand, when I asked my Droid about using the bathroom, I got a list of hits pertaining to using the wrong restroom (i.e., the one intended for the opposite sex).  It was a very funny list, linking to some amusing sites.  (You may be wondering:  have I ever used the wrong restroom?  Well, yes, once, purely by accident.  I was in there doing my business and thinking, “What kind of public restroom doesn’t have urinals?”  When the answer suddenly came to me, I hightailed it right on out of there.)

Sometimes Siri’s personality gets in the way.  For example, I asked Siri, “What time is it?” and she responded, “At the third stroke, it will be 16:26.  Beep.  Beep. Beep.”  This was more confusing than amusing, and besides, it was inaccurate:  the actual time was like 4:25:30.  I would rather Siri have a more reliable connection to the NIST Internet time servers than a zingy response.

If your desk is as cluttered as mine, being able to summon your phone by voice is very handy.  When I call out my keyphrase for my Droid, it makes a pretty loud two-tone beep to let me know it’s listening.  The iPad beep is much quieter.  Neither device responds in any useful way to the question, “Where are you?”  Siri says, “Wherever you are, that’s where I am.”  This isn’t that funny, and for most people wouldn’t even be true.  (I bring my iPad, Droid, silverware, and all other valuables with me wherever I go, so don’t bother burglarizing my house.)

 This is where these devices are inconsistent.  Their programmers need to decide if the device should have a sense of self or not.  Siri speaks in the first person (e.g., “Who, me?” and “I respect you”), but when I say, “Hey Siri, how’s your battery doing?” she has no idea what “your” means.  She replies, “My apologies ... I couldn’t find those stocks.”  Pretty useless.

When I tell my Droid, “Find my phone,” it makes this cool sonar sound continuously until I find and silence it.  When I tell Siri “Find my iPad,” she tries to make me turn on Location Services.  Look, Siri, if I could do that, I’d know where you are, and I wouldn’t be asking.

I’ve often thought that one of the most useful features of voice response would be getting help configuring the device.  So I said, “Hey Siri, turn on your flash.”  She replied,  “Who, me?”  I decided some context might help, so within the camera app I said to turn on the flash.  Siri replied, “It doesn’t look like you have an app named ‘flash.’  If you’d like, I can help you look for it on the App Store.”  I just don’t think this is that difficult a concept.  You have a camera.  It has a flash.  Turn it on.

The Droid does respond to “Take a selfie.”  It ought to say, “I can’t,” because its camera is basically its face.  But its reaction, which is to launch the camera, put it in selfie mode, and set a self-timer, is actually fairly useful, at least for the hands-free breed of narcissist.  When I tell Siri “take a selfie,” she says, “You’ll need to unlock your iPad first.”  This isn’t very helpful, and in fact isn’t even true.  As my older daughter discovered, the iPad can be used as a camera even by somebody who lacks my fingerprint and passcode.  And when I follow Siri’s instructions and unlock the iPad, it does go into camera mode, but not selfie mode.  As regards this command, Siri is fairly incompetent.

Something that bothers me about my Droid’s AI is a certain lack of resourcefulness.  When I ask it, “How do I look?” I think it should activate the camera in selfie mode, to use as a mirror.  Or It could really wow me by saying, “Your hair is a mess.”  (When you consider modern digital camera technology, which can tell if a subject’s eyes are closed, this hairdo check actually seems quite doable.) 

I asked Siri, “How do I look?” and she really stumbled.  She kept hearing, “How do I luck,” which she should have automatically revised because it just doesn’t make any sense.  One time, she thought I asked, “How do I lurk?” and replied, “I found something on the web about ‘how do I lurk.’ Check it out.”  That’s really unfortunate.  I wonder what kind of banner ads and spam I’ll get now that the Internet thinks I’m a stalker.

Finally Siri heard me right and replied, “Judging by your voice, I’d say you must be fairly attractive.”  Clever, but also kind of patronizing.  I mean, it’s bad enough asking an inanimate object such a personal question, but to be damned with faint praise ... that’s pretty pathetic.  I think Siri should be generous and say, “I would so go to bed with you.”

At least Siri respects my privacy.  When I said, “Get me home,” she replied, “I don’t know your home address.  In fact, I don’t know anything about you.”  I found this really reassuring, especially after Cortana’s attempted shakedown earlier.  (Yes, Siri did ask me to go into settings and identify myself, but didn’t require it.)

I have to say, though, there’s something a bit creepy about Siri.  When I ask something complicated, such as a question regarding navigation, there’s this little blurry light that bounces back and forth along the bottom edge of the screen, which reminded me of something sinister.  After racking my brain for awhile I realized what:  the single roving eye of a Cylon from “Battlestar Galactica.”  Is Siri some kind of kindred spirit to the AI powering the Cylons?  If so, that doesn’t reflect well ... the Cylons were really pretty stupid.  They always went down like bowling pins.

Another creepy thing:  when I said, “Hey Siri, lock my iPad,” she replied, “I’d like to, but I cannot.  My apologies.”  This almost gave me chills.  It brought me right back to the HAL 9000 in “2001 – A Space Odyssey,” when Dave says, “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” and HAL replies, “I’m sorry, Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that.”  Who is Siri’s master:  me, or Apple?

Feature parity with Moto?

If I were designing Siri, or working on an update package, I’d pay close attention to what the competition is doing.  I’d make sure, for example, that anything Moto could do, Siri could do better.  This evidently hasn’t occurred to Apple, because there are all kinds of commands Moto can handle that Siri cannot.  For example, if you ask Moto, “What’s up?” it will trawl through your appointments, e-mails, etc. and give you an update.  I asked Siri “What’s up?” and she said, “I’m thinking about pie.  Mmmmmm.” 

If you tell Moto, “Talk to me,” it will announce incoming calls and texts for the next 30 minutes.  This doesn’t occur to Siri, who responds, “I’d really prefer it if you talked to me.  Tell me your hopes, your dreams, where you’d like to make a dinner reservation.”  So I told Siri, “I hope my dinner is yummy tonight.”  She replied, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘I hope my dinner is yummy tonight.’  How about a web search for it?”  Not a very good listener, since she specifically asked me to tell her my hopes!  Just lip service.  I said, “I dream of being rich and famous one day,” and got the same “I don’t know what you mean” response.

I said, “Hey Siri, play Beethoven on YouTube.”  She replied, “You don’t seem to have an app named ‘YouTube.’ We could see if the App Store has it.”  Don’t play dumb with me, Siri!

I asked Siri to zap my screen (which is how Moto is told to take a screen snapshot).  Siri kept hearing “zapped my screen” (which resulted in a web search) and then eventually heard “zap ice cream,” and—bizarrely—pulled up a Dairy Queen in Beulah, North Dakota.  I’m not kidding.

Since screen snapshots are really useful to bloggers, I kept trying:  “Hey Siri, take a screen snapshot.”  To my great surprise, Siri didn’t play dumb, but simply refused:  “That’s beyond my abilities at the moment.”  Huh?  No way is this beyond her abilities.  I managed to learn (no thanks to Siri) how to get a snapshot (pressing two far-flung buttons at once).  So it can be done.  Why can’t Siri do it?  Is she a bit ... simple?

You may be wondering how I know so many cool Moto commands.  It’s because you can say, “Get a list of commands,” and Moto provides one.  I told Siri, “Get a list of commands” and though—as you can see—she did hear me right, she decided just to show me a map of the nearest Coast Guard station.  WTF!?

Is Siri the best at anything?

Okay, I’ve been pretty harsh on Siri here.  Is she better than Moto at anything?  Well, yes.  I think her navigation is better.  I just asked Moto, “Where is the nearest pizza place?” Moto replied, “Here are the listings for ‘nearest pizza place’ within zero point eight miles.”  The nearest place—Gioia Pizzeria—was listed first among non-paid entries, but at the top of the screen was an ad for Little Caesars $5 Pizza, which a) isn’t nearby, and b) isn’t even pizza.  (I don’t know what that stuff is, but it ain’t pizza.)  Meanwhile, if I were trying to get this answer without having to look at my phone—like, if I were driving—this written response would be useless.  (At least Moto did better than when I first blogged about this, when it lied and said Zachary’s Pizza was the closest.)

Here, Siri did better.  She replied, aloud, “The nearest one I found is Gioia in Berkeley, which averages 4½ stars and is inexpensive.  Would you like to try it?”  Presumably if I’d said yes, she’d have navigated there.  Instead I said, “Actually, Siri, it’s pretty expensive.”  To which she replied, “I’m sorry.”  Well played, Sir[i]!

It’s in the realm of a more specific request where Siri really shines.  I asked, “Where’s the nearest deep dish Chicago style pizza place?”  She showed me Zachary’s, which is correct.  I’m pretty impressed, especially since when I asked Moto the same question, it showed me Giordano’s and Lou Malnati’s, both of which are in Chicago.  As you can see, Moto clearly heard “nearest” correctly, but somehow missed my meaning.

The second really lame thing about iPads

Earlier I complained about how you have to plug in the iPad to get voice activation, and promised to reveal another huge shortcoming.  I doubt you’ll immediately grasp how lame this next one is, but here goes:  Apple iOS doesn’t support the Dvorak keyboard layout, which is  more efficient than QWERTY and has been supported by Apple since the Apple IIc.  According to Wikipedia, the IIc  “had a mechanical switch above the keyboard whereby the user could switch back and forth between the QWERTY layout and the Dvorak layout.... The IIc Dvorak layout was even mentioned in 1984 ads, which stated that the World’s Fastest Typist, Barbara Blackburn, had set a record on an Apple IIc with the Dvorak layout.”

                                                               

I haven’t been able to find anything on the Internet about why Apple decided not to support Dvorak on the iPad.  I guess the default answer for their product choices—“Because we’re gods, and we can do whatever we want!”—will have to do.  It’s so frustrating, since this has got to be really simple to do in software.  It would probably take some Apple developer about five minutes.

But why should you care, since you type on QWERTY anyway?  Well, consider the security ramifications of encouraging third party developers to create such fundamental utilities as keyboard software.  After installing Fleksy, a free Dvorak-enabled app, I messed about with the iPad a little, wandered off to do something more useful, and then realized, “Duh, I’ve just done something really stupid.”  What better way to steal somebody’s keystrokes than to create an app that quite obviously has access to everything I type?

At first I told myself this was no big deal.  After all, I’m mainly using the iPad to browse the web, and I don’t kid myself that my every move on the Internet isn’t already tracked, and not just by the NSA.  (By the way, keep up the good work, guys!  Thanks for keeping me safe!)

But of course, there’s the little matter of passwords.  I felt like I’d just given away the keys to the kingdom, or at least to the two websites I’d logged into (my bank and my e-mail).  I was all set to go change those two passwords, but first decided to see how hard it is to switch iPad keyboards on the fly, so going forward I could type passwords with the native Apple iOS keyboard.  Perhaps there would be a function key right on the soft Fleksy keyboard to simplify this switch?  And then I noticed this:

It might be hard to tell, but in the first snapshot above, the cursor is in the Username field.  In the second snapshot, the cursor is in the Password field.  The same flag that tells the OS to obscure the password (i.e., showing ******* instead of what’s typed) tells the iPad to switch to the standard Apple iOS keyboard.  So those passwords I typed before? I’d typed them on the standard QWERTY  keyboard without even realizing it.  Those passwords weren’t at risk of being intercepted by the Fleksy keyboard app after all.  That’s pretty clever of Apple, isn’t it?

Of course, when your cleverness only serves the mitigate the downside of your pointless shortcoming, it’s actually a lot less impressive.  Hey Apple, why not support the Dvorak layout to begin with, like you did with the Apple IIe, the Apple III, the Macintosh, the Quadra, the PowerBook, the Performa, the iMac, the iBook, and the MacBook?

At the time of this writing, Apple is sitting on over $200 billion in cash.  Couldn’t they spend a few bucks to match the features of their own earlier products?  Hell, they could probably get an unpaid intern to do it.  I, for one, am not feeling the love ... even if Siri does claim to respect me.

Other albertnet posts on A.I. 

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Almost Intelligent - Part I

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

“Almost intelligent” might be a good name for somebody’s biography (or autobiography) but here I’m talking about artificial intelligence.  My last post described my experience chatting with an application called Cleverbot that tried to simulate human dialog convincingly.  Here, I’ll tackle the subject of AI language more generally, looking at speech recognition, natural language, and translation. 

Do we care?

If you really don’t care about AI at all, go read something else—or, better yet, read on to see why maybe you should care.

On the one hand, AI is very exciting.  As computers have become “smarter,” and easier to use, they’ve gotten so useful it’s hard to imagine how we ever did without them.  I’m thinking about Google, GPS and other mapping applications, package tracking, e-mail spam filters … the list goes on and on.

On the other hand, AI is a bit scary, and as a human I prefer to believe I could never be replaced by a computer.  I shudder at the thought that human behavior could be so unvarying and predictable that one day we’ll barely be better than a really good computer program.  I want my computer applications to get smart, but not too smart.

Voice recognition and natural language

There’s a button on the side of my smartphone that, when pressed, startles me by causing the speakerphone to say, “Say a command!”  I’m vaguely aware that my phone will respond to voice commands but have no interest in issuing them.  Most of the cool features of smartphones involve the silent, non-speech stuff you can do—e-mail, Internet browsing, etc.—as you’ll notice on the subway when half the people are silently tapping away.  (The popularity of texting—a way to privately communicate without being eavesdropped on by the person you’re ostensibly talking to face-to-face—is a classic example of how phones are becoming increasingly mute.)

That said, the iPhone’s voice-recognition application, Siri, seems to be making a bit of a splash.  (Nobody I know uses Siri yet, but I’m sure some will.)  This demo shows how Siri is pretty good at understanding speech and figuring out what you want it to do.  (I played with a Droid phone recently and it was also very good at typing for me as I spoke.)  The reviewer asks Siri, “Where can I have lunch?”  Siri replies, “I found fourteen restaurants whose reviews mention lunch.  Twelve of them are close to you.”  This seems easier than typing into Google on a little phone.  But the natural language feature isn’t perfect; the reviewer says, “How about downtown?” and Siri replies, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘how about downtown.’”

Perhaps Siri’s communication isn’t “connection-oriented”—that is, it doesn’t consider “how about downtown?” in the context of “Where can I have lunch?” but takes the two queries as totally discrete and unrelated.  If so, this is a major shortcoming. 

The reviewer tries again:  “I want to have lunch downtown.”  Siri replies, “I found 3 restaurants matching ‘downtown.’”  Useless!  Siri knows where the user is, geographically, but does not realize that “downtown” in this context pertains to location, not a restaurant’s name.  Here, Siri starts to look like a mere forwarder of requests, always passing the buck to Google instead of applying intelligence to the request.

Simple conversion of speech to text looks pretty good on Siri.  The reviewer dictated a message to it, and almost everything came out.  The notable exception was how Siri transcribed the reviewer’s spoken comment “I need to make some videos about the iPhone 4S.”  Siri typed, “I need to make some videos about the iPhone 4 ass.”  The reviewer doesn’t notice this gaff, telling the YouTube viewer, “There it is.  It figured out exactly what I wanted to say.”  Dangerous, don’t you think?  What if the reviewer meant to e-mail the text “S as in Sam” but actually e-mailed “ass as in Sam,” to his boss, Sam?

Not that Siri doesn’t try hard.  When the reviewer says, “Set a timer for 3 minutes,” Siri replies, “OK, I started a three-minute timer.  Don’t overcook that egg.”  Not bad.  Actually, it is bad.  For one thing, “that egg,” when spoken by Siri, comes out “ditek.”  Without the text on the screen you’d never understand what it said.  Meanwhile, it’s obvious that Siri is trying to be funny, and completely failing.  There’s nothing witty about Siri making a lame guess as to what the timer is for.  What’s worse, Siri could create the impression that three minutes is actually how long you should cook an egg.  In fact that’s not nearly enough time, and everybody knows an undercooked egg presents a salmonella risk.

A fundamental problem

Of course I’m nitpicking with the egg timer example, and (to a lesser extent) with the “ass” example, but they bring up an important point:  language, as one of the primary interfaces between humans, requires far more than just understanding what is heard and forming sentences in response.  Having a sanity-check reflex that keeps you from using words like “ass” in mixed company, and knowing whether your joke is actually funny, are complicated processes.  Verbal communication can be a minefield, especially for a computer application that stabs around in the dark.

Consider, for example, the old joke about the Texan who gets into Harvard.  While touring the campus, he asks a student, “Excuuuse me, can you tell me where the library’s at?”  The student replies haughtily, “Here at Haaarvard, we never end a sentence with a preposition.”  The Texan replies, “Okay, can ya tell me where the library’s at, asshole?”

Upon inspection, this exchange, though brief, is quite complex.  The Harvard student’s response to the Texan’s query shows a decision that might not occur to an AI application—that is, to a) not answer the question, and b) use the opportunity to deliver a scornful message about class and intellect.  The Texan’s comeback makes a statement about a) his refusal to be cowed, b) the difference between cultivation and innate intelligence.  Meanwhile, the joke as a whole counts on the listener enjoying an opportunity to feel superior to both Harvard students and Texans, while exulting in the surprise and wit of the punch line.  Worlds away from “Enjoy ditek.”

Maybe you think I’m overreaching here, that such nuance will never be expected of AI.  Maybe AI is just a tool to make machines more useful to humans, and little gaffs don’t matter much.  When a woman asks her husband, “Do these pants make my butt look fat?” he is instantly plunged into a terribly complicated interaction, because of his relationship to the woman.  So much hinges on his response.  If he says “yes” he’s obviously dead.  If he says “no” too vociferously, he seems patronizing.  He could try the reverse-psychology approach and say, “No, your butt makes your butt look fat,” but she better have a sense of humor and thick skin.  Or, he could ignore the question, or say, “Look, krill!”  Or he could say “yeahhh” lecherously (note that imparting this single syllable with the sense of “I want some of that!” is far beyond the current state of the art in AI voice synthesis).  But when a human asks Siri “Am I fat?” and gets back, “Here’s your a.m. alarm” and “I found 8 fitness centers fairly close to you,” he or she can more easily blow it off.

This idea—that computers don’t have to play nice when “talking” to humans—is strongly supported by a scene in “The Terminator” when the evil cyborg, confronted by his landlord—“Hey buddy, you got a dead cat in there, or what?”—scans through a menu of possible responses—“YES/NO; OR WHAT; GO AWAY; PLEASE COME BACK LATER; FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE; FUCK YOU”—and chooses the penultimate one.  Of course when you’re the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger you don’t have to have a friendly user interface.

That said, I would argue that, to the extent humans are to embrace AI when using electronic devices, precision and nuance do matter.  We have to trust these devices not to turn “S” into “ass,” not to waste our time with lists of restaurants we’d never eat at, and not to infuriate us with messages like “cannot undo.”  Even if you’ve never found yourself yelling profanities at your computer, I’m sure you’ve seen others do it.

Consider this cautionary tale.  My dad bought one of the first consumer-oriented computers in history, the Hewlett-Packard Model 85.  This was 1980, a year before the IBM PC.  the HP-85 was about as far from Siri (or at least the design intent of Siri) as you can get.  There was no software for it; you had to program it yourself.  Meanwhile, its version of BASIC was proprietary, diverging from the industry standard (e.g., you used the command “DISP” instead of “PRINT”).  I had my brother try out one of my first programs.  It prompted him to type his name.  With great hesitation—he was greatly fearful of doing something wrong and damaging our dad’s expensive machine—he typed “Max.”  Then he sat there waiting for something to happen.  Nothing did, because my program didn’t say anything about hitting the Enter key when done.  Max looked a bit nervous.  “It’s not working!  It’s not doing anything!” he cried.  I told him to hit Enter.  When he did, the computer promptly displayed the message “Max is a jerk” (the whole point of my program).  Max got really angry and flustered and to this day does not use a computer.  This probably isn’t just because of my program; the HP-85 was less than user-friendly and doubtless gave Max the wrong impression of where home computing was going.

Translation

Here is where the AI picture is, to me, much rosier.  Early attempts at translation, like Alta Vista’s Babelfish, were a joke.  You pasted the foreign-language text into a window, gave it the language to translate it into, and then were presented with a salad of translated words (with un-translated ones sprinkled like croutons) that made no sense at all.  The only real use for this tool was translating things into Tristan.

What’s Tristan?  Well, I used to have a colleague, a computer programmer, whose native-tongue language skills were so poor it was impossible to understand a thing he wrote.  His e-mails always gave my colleagues and me a laugh, and in his honor we invented a language and named it after him.  (It wasn’t really called Tristan, because his last name wasn’t really Tristan; I’ve changed it to protect him from possible embarrassment.)  To translate something into Tristan, you’d type normal text, translate it into French using Babelfish, and then translate it back to English.  The results were pure comedy, with not a shred of sense left intact.

I think people are naturally forgiving of poor translation, because we’ve studied grammar and foreign languages in school and can really appreciate how difficult a task this is.  Plus, the results are so often funny, they put us in a good mood.  Consider the urban legend that “Coca-Cola,” when first translated into Chinese, came out meaning “bite the wax tadpole.”  (To this day I’ll complain about something by saying it bites the wax tadpole.)  Brian Hayes, writing in “American Scientist,” makes an interesting comment about AI efforts to parse grammatical constructions when translating text:  “The failure of this approach is sometimes dramatized with the tale of the English→ Russian→ English translation that began with ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ and ended with ‘The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.’”

More recently, online translation engines such as Google Translate have gotten much, much better.  As Hayes describes, “The idea is to ignore the entire hierarchy of syntactic and semantic structures—the nouns and verbs, the subjects and predicates, even the definitions of words—and simply tabulate correlations between words in a large collection of bilingual texts.”  At first, this strikes me as a “brute force” approach that is further from artificial intelligence than earlier efforts, however hapless, to actually parse a sentence grammatically.  But as Hayes points out, the modern technique is actually lot closer to how humans learn to talk.  (It’s also more similar to how we would learn a foreign language if we had the good fortune to go live in another country, versus making our way with a textbook and classes.)

I first tried Google Translate when I was trying to track a package that was being shipped to me from a web merchant in France.  I have studied French for years, but understanding statements about logistics and customs offices would be difficult in any language.  I was presented with this:  “Votre colis est sorti du bureau d'échange.  Il est en cours d'acheminement dans le pays de destination.”  This would have totally tripped up the original Babelfish, but Google served up an entirely comprehensible translation:  “Your package is out of the office of exchange. It is in transit in the country of destination.”  (Not only was I delighted with how clear this was, I was relieved my package wasn’t stuck in customs.)  Translating this English back into French, and then back into English, I get “Your package is out of the office of exchange. It is in transit to the destination country.”  Very little of the “Tristan effect.”  (There’s some fuzziness around “to” vs. “in” with regard to the destination country, but I can live with that.)

To reassure myself then the Man of Letters wouldn’t be replaced by a machine anytime soon, I tried some poetry: 

But the Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

When I fed this into the new version of Babelfish (which works similarly to Google’s), and translated it into French and back, the response was this: 

But the Raven seductive yet all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a seat padded before the bird and bust and door;
Then, on the Velvet sinking, I hauled myself to tie Fancy: fancy,
Think what this bird threatening of antan - the sad bird, awkward, frightening,
Ghent and disturbing past Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

Aha!  Gibberish!  I was about to feel all smug about the superiority of humans over AI, but then tried Google Translation with the same English à French à English task: 

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
 I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
 Then, upon the velvet sinking me, I betook myself to linking
 Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
 What this grim, ungainly, ghastly bird, gaunt, and ominous of yesteryear
 Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

Wow.  That’s so good it’s creepy.  But before you despair and decide the computers will ultimately render the human race unnecessary, be sure to check out my next albertnet post, wherein I examine how well AI does playing games—another classic measure of its progress.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

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