This question popped into my head last night.
I vote for TOS: The Paradise Syndrome.
Kirk says “Kirk to Enterprise” and that activates the door. Of course, the actual phrase might have been “Kirk to Enterprise,” but that seems needlessly Douglas Adams to me.
Could you explain this a little more? What do you mean by a ‘Digital Assistant’, a real one or something imagined in science fiction? What does that episode of Star Trek have to do with a Digital Assistant misunderstanding something? What do you mean by oldest? An event on an episode of Star Trek can’t be the oldest in all senses because those events haven’t happened yet in their own timeline.
Does. Not. Compute.
I understood what the OP meant.
Like in LA Story when Steve Martin was programming his voice activated phone, and he says “call…MOM” and the phone connects to Domino’s Pizza. But that was 1991.
I’d think The Paradise Syndrome was the earliest example. Prior to that “digital assistants” didn’t misunderstand, they just got snarky.
The first that comes to mind is Nelson on The Simpsons writing “Beat up Martin” on his Apple Newton, and it coming out as “Eat up Martha.” That wasn’t very early, though–1995.
Can anyone explain what this means?
Okay, I looked at a transcript of the episode. They are trying to open a door that they accidentally opened once before:
SPOCK: This obelisk is one huge deflector mechanism. It is imperative that we get inside immediately. Captain, we do not have much time.
KIRK: McCoy.
(McCoy and Chapel start tending to Miramanee.)
KIRK: I don’t know how to get inside.
SPOCK: If we are not able to gain entry and activate the deflector mechanism within the next fifty minutes, this entire planet will be destroyed.
KIRK: The key must be in these symbols. We’ve got to decipher them.
SPOCK: I already have to some extent, Captain. They are musical notes.
KIRK: You mean entry can be gained by playing certain notes on a musical instrument?
SPOCK: That would be one method. Another would be a series of tonal qualities spoken in their proper sequence.
KIRK: Give me your communicator. Tonal control, consonants and vowels. I must have hit it accidentally when I contacted the ship.
SPOCK: If you could remember your exact words, Captain.
KIRK: (flipping open the communicator) Kirk to Enterprise.
SCOTT [OC]: Aye, Captain.
(The hatch slides open, with Miramanee still lying on it.)
Luckliy he didn’t say “I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle”.
In the 1975 parody Star Drek, the elevator misinterprets the captain’s command to go to the transporter room.
Transcript: https://madmusic.com/song_details.aspx?SongID=152
JERK: Elevator, transporter room.
ELEVATOR: I’m fine, how are you?
JERK: ELEVATOR, I SAID TRANSPORTER ROOM!
ELEVATOR: I’m fine, how are you?
JERK: Oh, forget it! Elevator to Engineering! Beam us down from here, Snotty!
Recording: "Star Drek" - 1975 Star Trek spoof by Bobby Pickett (Dr. Demento) - YouTube
“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Is the implication that Kirk accidentally said the code-word that opens the obelisk when he spoke the phrase ‘Kirk to Enterprise’? Maybe the important part of the phrase was ‘enter’.
This obelisk may have been user-friendly, like the gate to Moria which opens when you say ‘Mellon’ (friend).
Kirk was lucky he didn’t have to say it in Navaho.
The door has a musical key that opens it.
The communicator sound, plus the phrase “Kirk to Enterprise” triggered the mechanism.
Perhaps the door was really programmed to open to the phrase “Kirk to Enterprise” but probably not. That’s something that Douglas Adams might have written.
I got the Star Trek reference without needing the transcript, and I feel that it is NOT an example of “misunderstanding”. Rather, the words “Kirk to Enterprise” - which in English is a perfectly reasonable way of opening a radio conversation - happens to sound exactly like the code words that the obelisk’s designers programmed for opening the door.
For all we know, in the native language, the sounds “Kirk to Enterprise” might have been gibberish, like “[My password is] 1-B-2-B-3-squiggledorp”. Or maybe the obelisk only needed the word “enter” (like eburacum45 suggested) and “Kirk to …prise” was superfluous. Or maybe “Aye captain” was the correct trigger.
In any case, no one misunderstood anything here. I think Just_Asking_Questions’s example of confusing “Mom” and “Domino’s” is much better. (And HAL understood Dave perfectly, when he responded with “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”)
It was stated that the language was based on musical notes. I always thought that it was the communicator chirp that triggered the door, and not the words.
I can beat the OP - Asimov’s “Little Lost Robot”, 1947. A frustrated engineer tells a robot with a modified understanding of the First Law of Robotics (it’s missing the “nor by inaction allow a human to come to harm” part) to “go lose yourself”, which per its understanding of the Second Law of Robotics it takes as a command to hide itself among a group of otherwise identical robots that are fully First Law compatible.
Logic puzzles ensue.
Oooh… That’s a good one!
I agree with this, but I can’t see any of the locals being able to make communicator tweeps vocally. Maybe the Keeper of the Beam God is from a family line of genetic throat mutants.
The correct key is probably “kark t’ ent” (which is “open sesame” in proto-Navajo) and the system ignores superfluous sounds. It was also programmed to be a bit…generous…in what it accepts, as the Providers knew they were simple folk with no written language.
Though what they thought they were doing with that “information beam” , whether in sequence or out of sequence, well, that’s a bit iffy. “Oopsie I accidentally brain wiped the chief.”
What about the (apocryphal?) early computer translation program that rendered “out of sight, out of mind” as “invisible idiot”?
What about The Monkey’s Paw?
(That’s what the OP meant by ‘digital’, right?)
OK, that took me a few seconds.
Ouch.
OK, I thought of this thread the other day, when I was driving up to Durango. I would ask Siri to play different songs or albums from my library, and there are some that she just couldn’t get. One that was particularly funny went like this:
“Siri, play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor”
- “You don’t have a app for that.”
“Siri, play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor” - “You don’t have a app for that.”
(Arrghh)
“Siri, play Bach’s Toccata”
- “Now playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor”
(WTF!!!)