An Inter-species Online Chat

Movie stars, rock stars, politicians, even astronauts have done online chats. But this one is a first. An inter-species online chat.

Koko, the gorilla, who has studied American Sign Language for the last 25 years, is going on the net. Koko will participate in an online chat at 7 eastern on Monday night. The questions will be read in sign language to Koko and her replies will be typed in.

Kevin Connelly of the Gorilla Foundation says Koko isn't new to computers. She used a special voice synthesizer with a keyboard in the late seventies...

"And then much later, late eighties, early nineties, with the help of Apple Computer, developed a specially modified, gorilla proof Macintosh computer that had a touch screen of over seventy different icons that had images and words."

How will Koko respond to the online questions?

"We get hundreds of letters a day and phone calls from teachers and school children and a lot of the questions are pretty straight forward and simple. Things of interest to them. What's your favorite color? And things like that. But I'm sure we'll get a whole range of questions. Some of them quite complex. We get posed philosophical questions from time to time."

On AOL you can find the chat by typing AOL Live as the key word. Or you can participate on the web at envirolink.org.