Из ранней истории искусственного интеллекта: голосовая распознавалка у британского компьютерного концерна ICL (ныне Fujitsu Siemens) была обучена русскому языку. Приехала важная делегация из СССР, начальник начал ее проверять... и ничего не сработало. Оказывается, не учли грузинский акцент.
Speak to me, Nadia! c. 1975 George Brodie
The Voice-Operated Calculator at the Research and Advanced Development Centre in Stevenage was super for demonstrations. Go up to it and say: ‘Four plus four equals’ and it would faithfully answer ‘Eight’. And so on for other numbers and other operations (no, this is not Alan Beer’s French counting pig joke, that might come elsewhere). Came the time when a highly important delegation from the USSR was to be entertained. The recognition and encoding process was essentially language-independent so, in preparation for the day, it was educated in Russian numerals and arithmetic operators. And in due course, after appropriate exposition through the interpreter, the leader of the visiting delegation was invited to challenge this great western machine. Advancing to the microphone he uttered the Russian equivalent of ‘Four plus four equals’ and awaited enlightenment. None came. He was asked to try again and did so. Again an embarrassing lack of response. He tried for a third time, with the same result. ‘I’m very sorry’, said the machine’s developer, ‘but it doesn’t seem to recognise the gentleman’s Russian’. Straight-faced, the interpreter duly interpreted this. Whereupon two things happened: the face of the leader of the delegation became empurpled with rage and embarrassment, and all his colleagues nearly fell about with laughter. It transpired that he was a Georgian, and spoke extremely bad Russian with an accent so thick that it was almost impenetrable.
(Carmichael, Hamish. An ICL Anthology: Anecdotes and Recollections from the People of ICL. 1996)
А начальник, которого так обидели бриты, был, вероятно, не кто иной, как Джермен Гвишиани...