A robot language?

Around 2008 I started getting interested in constructed languages. The first one was obviously esperanto. But after a while, I started to notice and deplore, like many, its flaws. I then looked into one its spin-off, Ido, which resolved some of those issues. That language, created in 1907, was maybe well-suited for the time, but sadly it too has aged badly, being way too Eurocentric in a globalizing world.

And so, unsatisfied, I sat down and decided to create my own international language, Poplengwo (that I will shorten as Ppl), the latest version of which was published in 2015.

In April 2020, I discovered another international language which had already been published for 10 years, and which was to me the best notable international language that I'd ever seen: Lingwa de planeta (or LdP).
If you're interesting in promoting a good international language, I would definitely recommend you have a look at LdP. It has the advantage of already having a community and it is surely more notorious than Poplengwo will ever be!

When reading about LdP, I was struck to see how similar some aspects were with Poplengwo. For example:

• When creating words, we try to maximize the number of people in the world who will understand it naturally. As a result, the two languages look like a mix of English, Romance languages and Chinese.
• Both languages are predominantly isolating languages. "The word form never changes."
• In both languages, we try to make the part-of-speech recognizable by the ending of the words, but if it is not convenient, we favor the similarity with the original language. "There are no fixed endings for the word classes, there are preferable, though. Thus most verbs end in i, but there are some exceptions"
• We use the principle of necessity: "The use of special particle is optional if its meaning is clear from the context."

All the citations above are taken from LdP's Wikipedia page.

If we focus on the differences between the two languages, we see that LdP chose to stay as close as possible to the existing natural languages, and thus tends to feel more natural and convenient. For example, like many languages, it has possessive pronouns (you say "my" instead of "of me"). Subjects and direct objects don't require to be introduced by a preposition (unlike Japanese) if they are placed in the default SVO order.

Ppl, on the other hand, tends to apply logical rules more strictly, probably influenced by Lojban and by my personal interest in mathematics and formal logic.
This is visible in the alphabet and pronunciation - one letter exactly matches one sound, as well as in the rules of phonological stress, which allows the words to be unambiguously told apart, and finally in the grammar, where the syntax could be strictly defined in a Backus-Naur form.

As a result, Ppl is probably more suitable than most conlangs for a robot, because it can apply systematic algorithms to parse sounds as words and words as sentences. This means that using this language would help humans communicate more efficiently with robots, reducing ambiguities and the risk of misinterpretation, for example when making requests to your smart-home appliances.

Currently, communication between humans and robots (more generally computers) exists in two extremes. On one side, humans must adapt completely to computers when writing code using programming languages, which incidentally have the disadvantage of being only written and not spoken, and when there's a bug, it's the human's job to fix it. Also note that humans would never choose to use a programming language to talk to each other. On the other side, computers must adapt completely to humans: systems controlled by voice must understand humans in their natural languages, in all their varieties, and when the robot gets something wrong, the human gets angry and it's all Siri's or Alexa's fault. Note that computers also never use human languages to talk to each other because it would be highly inefficient for them.

I believe an intermediate language could exist, where both the human and the robot have to make an effort. The human would make an effort to make well-defined and explicitly phrased requests, and the robot would still have to deal with the fuzziness of speech, as voice recognition already does, and could interact with the human to give them opportunities to refine and confirm their requests. At this point, maybe robots could even use such a language to talk to each other, and maybe humans could too.