Talk to Your Plants with the Help of Microsoft’s Research Project Florence

Microsoft’s Research Project Florence will allow you to talk to the plants in your garden, surprised? Remember Indian scientist JC Basu who told the world that plants have life, feelings and they can talk and listen too,

From centuries we have been hearing and reading that talking to plants or playing soothing music nearby the plants help to grow them better. Also gardeners have claimed the same and do believe that plants benefits from human conversations and react to their environment in a language of electrical impulses and chemicals.

Well, the question arises, whether there is a way that we humans and the plants could talk to one another? Big thanks to Project Florence, a project created by post-doc researcher at Microsoft, Helene Steiner, which allows you to chat with plants in their own unknown but native language.

Talk to Your Plants with the Help of Microsoft’s Research Project Florence, Image courtesy

Under the hood, Project Florence is a sensor-loaded plant capsule that is connected to a companion computer with which you can send messages to the plant, hang on! Project Florence makes the plants to reply your messages back again.

Check the real heck here:

To start communicating, you can type anything you like at the devices accompanying terminal. Then, a few things happen to that message at the same time. Initially, your message is mapped for a sentiment, whether it is positive or negative message? And after that the sentiment is translated into a Morse Code-like series of blinks. For instance, a very tender sentiment might appear as a long red blinks as red light causes a plant to flower.

There are sensors connected to the leaves, roots as well as in the soil and air too which will get a general gist of how plant is feeling. Are the leaves giving off any sensitive chemical? Does the soil seem to be dry? From those sensor readings, the plants make a positive or negative “response” to your sentiment. The plants reaction is translated into words we can understand and sent back to us as a response from the plant.

Speaking about the feelings of plants, the research Doc said, “We can almost create moods of the plant, and abstract the message that comes back. When I ask you as question and you are in a really good mood the response is probably better than you are tired. That’s why we thought natural language processing was a good way [to indicate the plant’s state].”

Meanwhile, Helene Steiner aims to continue to work closely with the Microsoft to further explore the core science behind this breakthrough technology.

Microsoft is also quite concerned about this idea of conversation between the humans and the plants. If you want to build more maintained agro systems and if you are interested in thinking about responsive environments, you could really think about bringing a natural environment into our technological world, rather than placing technology everywhere into our environment.

This breakthrough scientific discovery needs to be progressed and we are looking forward on this interesting project in coming years.