Hayes read and liked Manny's review of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character:

"Everyone has a collection of favorite stories that they enjoy telling; but it's unusual for the stories to be so good that a friend insists on writing them down, so that other people can appreciate them too. When I read this book, I almost feel that ...more Everyone has a collection of favorite stories that they enjoy telling; but it's unusual for the stories to be so good that a friend insists on writing them down, so that other people can appreciate them too. When I read this book, I almost feel that Feynman's telling the stories himself. Well, when that happens in real life, you always want to join in; here's my personal best effort at a Feynman-type anecdote. I hope it's now far enough in the past that the people concerned will see the funny side, if they happen to stumble across this page by accident!

STAR TREK AND THE PERSONAL SATELLITE ASSISTANT

It was early 2000, and I had just started working at NASA Ames Research Center in California. I was part of this little group that was supposed to be developing spoken language dialogue systems for space applications. The guy whose idea it was had started up the group, recruited me and two other people, and then left to join Microsoft Research before I'd even arrived. So everyone was looking at us suspiciously. Why did NASA need software that you could talk to?

I can't quite remember how it happened, but we began collaborating with this guy called Yuri, who had a project called Personal Satellite Assistant. Yuri was a nice person, but he just couldn't tell the difference between science-fiction and reality. His office was completely full of model spaceships - his favorites were Star Trek and Star Wars. He'd got the idea for the Personal Satellite Assistant from the scene in Star Wars where they're practicing light saber skills using this little floating ball. Yuri had suddenly thought that the astronauts would find something like that very useful. You'd have a little floating ball robot that you could talk to. It would have propellers and sensors and things, and you could tell it to go around the Space Station and check that the CO2 level was okay, things like that.

The astronauts didn't like it much, but luckily for Yuri there were other NASA managers who had trouble telling the difference between science-fiction and reality, and he got plenty of funding. By the time we came in, not much had happened about building the robot, but Yuri had paid quite a lot of money to a company that did models for science-fiction films. They had built him a cute mock-up of what the robot would look like when it was done, and he had it sitting on his desk alongside the Starship Enterprise and the X-Wing Fighters.

So we were supposed to build the dialogue system, the part that would let the astronauts talk to the little floating ball. We put something together in a few months, and it wasn't too bad. We didn't have a real robot to hook it up to, so we scanned in a picture of the Space Shuttle from a coffee-table book, and did a very simple animation. You had a red dot that represented the robot, and you could say things like "Go to the crew hatch" or "Measure the oxygen level at the flight deck and the main deck". The dot would move to the places you'd said, and it would give you the readings. Every single person we showed it to would make the same joke; they'd ask what would happen if you told it to open the pod bay doors. After a while, we added that command too. We'd just ask them to try it, and it would answer "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that". Most people thought that was funny.

Yuri's group liked our dialogue system, and it got demoed a lot, but they never gave us any of their funding. We'd talk to them about it, and they kept making excuses. They never said no, but they never said yes either. We began to feel just a little bit annoyed about that. Now it was late March, and we'd been sitting around having a few drinks, and suddenly we came up with this idea. I can't remember who thought of it, but as soon as we realized that my colleague Beth Ann had a sister in LA, it was irresistible. She called her, and the sister liked it to. It only took a couple of hours to set everything up.

So, on the morning of April first, Beth Ann emailed Yuri and asked if the Star Trek people had managed to get hold of him. They were planning a new movie. It was going to be one of those episodes where they go back in time. They'd return to the year 2000 and talk to the NASA scientists who were building the technology that would later become the Flight Deck. The twist was that they would use real NASA scientists, playing themselves. They'd asked Beth Ann if she could do it, and she'd already said yes, but the one they most wanted was Yuri, because of the amazing Personal Satellite Assistant. Beth Ann laid it on really thick. She even said that they'd asked her how she'd feel about playing a romantic scene opposite Captain Picard. She said she'd have to think about that. At the end, she told Yuri to call the producer, and she gave him this number with an LA area code. Of course, it was really her sister's number, and her sister had changed the message on her voicemail.

We couldn't believe he would fall for it, but he did. He called Sue Ellen's phone, and he left this long, rambling message that must have gone on for fifteen minutes, saying what a great idea he thought it was, and how much he wanted to be in on it, and how they were right, the Personal Satellite Assistant would be just perfect. I guess he must have figured out in the end that it was a hoax, but we never found out for sure.

The Personal Satellite Assistant project continued for nearly seven years. In the end, they had a ball-shaped robot that they ran in a room where it hung from this complicated system of extending arms. You could give it commands through a laptop (they never did get around to hooking up our dialogue system), and it would whir its fans and try to move. Usually, you had to push it a little to start it, but once you'd done that it would go places. There was a book called Robo Sapiens which had a chapter on the Personal Satellite Assistant, and described it as though it was really being used. Don't believe everything you read in popular science books - it's not always true!

We stopped working with Yuri. Instead, we went to the astronauts at the Johnson Space Center and asked them what they wanted spoken dialogue technology to do for them. We built them a prototype, and they tested it on the Space Station in 2005. You can read about that in my review of Putting Linguistics into Speech Recognition.
(less) "