#droidspeak

STAR WARS EPISODE II: Attack of the Clones 01:17:16

From Star Wars Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide by Ben Burtt

Current headcanon based on the question: Why don’t all droids have vocoders? Putting aside issues of droid!slavery (which is a huge unresolved issue, in my mind, don’t tell me they are intelligent puppies/toddlers, that makes it worse), i’ll make the following argument: Droids evolved that beep language among themselves ala any other natural language, like a sign language. Think about it. Would you put a vocoder on a roomba? No. So why would you put it on an astromech droid? I’m thinking, as artificial intelligence and artificial life was developed among robotic machines in Star wars, they started spontaneously communicating among themselves, transmitting to their fellow beeping machines their droid language. Even machines which humanoids had no intention of communicating with outside of interfaces. It is not that humans couldn’t program voices into robots, but only robots meant for regular human interaction had that voice module. Otherwise, why? it just adds to the cost.  But the droids, themselves, being intelligent and sentient, desired communication. And since they could understand language and voice commands, they had natural language processing intelligence, so it is no great leap to believe they would develop it.  And just like toddlers that grow up in multilingual households, most young humanoids with robots in the house learn to understand those beeps fluently enough for casual communication (for more important job stuff you might rely on an interpreter or computer interface). Maybe not all humans are fluent in droidspeak. But some are.  I don’t know, I think it is cute, maybe someone like Poe Dameron was exposed to R2D2 a lot as a kid, hanging out with the resistance from a young age, can understand BB-8 fluently, like Han understands Chewie.  And people demanding droids all have vocoders for convenience are like people demanding the deaf should speak and read lips only -- they are denying a crucial bit of droid culture. 

STAR WARS EPISODE II: Attack of the Clones 01:17:27