He can cook, play music, use a computer - and make sarcastic jokes
chatting with his 3,000-word vocabulary: He’s just had to sit through his offspring’s fourth birthday party, with the youngster tearing open his presents and jumping all over daddy’s head in his excitement. So I can understand the expression of weariness on Kanzi’s face when I ask him what he wants for lunch.
Then someone mentions the word ‘omelette’ — a Kanzi favourite, not just to eat but even to cook — and he’s off. He clambers on to a ledge in the viewing room of his concrete, steel and glass home and positions himself in front of a large, touch-sensitive computer screen showing a grid of some 400 symbols, or ‘lexigrams’, each representing a particular object or idea.
A huge forefinger skims dextrously over the icons, pressing the ones he wants. The computer voices his selections with an American accent.
He
summons eggs, onions, lettuce, grapes, pineapple. His four-year-old
son, Teco, comes up behind and presses ‘M&Ms’, pointing at a table
behind me where, just visible, there is indeed a bag of the sweets.