I don’t know if you have noticed all the news stories this year about new technologies designed to help us all communicate better. Many of these stories proclaim that artificial intelligence, or AI as it is popularly known, will revolutionize the way we communicate, whether through writing emails or articles or using social media or simply texting or talking on the phone. And all of that is well and good, but what happens if your technology doesn’t understand you?

Back in 2003, when much of today’s communication technology was still being developed, a police department in Louisiana had to temporarily replace its advanced voice recognition call system with a lower-tech substitute. Why did they have to replace their high-tech system? It was because their fancy new technology couldn’t unders…