It seemed so obvious that humans will talk to machines as if they are humans, humans after all have this tendency of personification of pretty much everything, including the forces of nature… Nope! It proved to be not so simple. The psychological situation of ‘talking to a machine’ has a very subtle purely psychological difficulty of unknown ability of the robot to hear and understand what you are saying and I think I have an idea how to overcome it, at least on our present stage of development and, maybe, start building the style for this type of conversations from right here.

Before the conversation.

    Let’s map the very beginning of your interaction with an unknown machine from the normal human situations when you don’t know whether the other person is present in the space that you are in or have just entered. Namely, those are the situations when you say:

      Is there anybody here?
      Is anybody here?
      Hello? Anybody here?

The expected answer if indeed somebody is in the space is:

      I am here.

… and a further mutual identification as a conversation starter.
    Of course if you hear noises that some human could produce himself or by activating a machine you ask:

      Is somebody/someone here/there?
      Who is here/there?

The expected answer again is:

      I am here.
      I am.
      It's me.

    Another similar but different situation is when you know that someone should be present in the space that you are in, but it is not clear whether (s)he is or not.

      Hey! Are you here/there?
      Are you here/there?
      Where are you?

By ‘you’ you mean the person that you expect. The expected answer is:

      Yes.
      I am here.

    This pretty much ends the list of scenarios when you need a robot to indicate his presence and his ability to react to speech and respond to you verbally.

Mutual identification.

    The second stage of conversation is an optional mutual identification, necessary if this is a first conversation or one of the speakers doesn’t recognise another.

Background

    Let’s look into the book of linguistics and English Grammar in particular.

In linguistics, grammatical mood (also mode) is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality.

…examples of moods are indicative, interrogative, imperative, subjunctive, injunctive, optative, and potential.

…Some Uralic Samoyedic languages have more than ten moods; Nenets has as many as sixteen.

The original Indo-European inventory of moods consisted of indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative.

English has indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods; other moods, such as the conditional, do not appear as morphologically distinct forms.

    There are two aspects in what we’ve just borrowed from wikipedia: English has three moods only, primitive languages have more moods.

May he live a hundred years! (optative)
Sing! (imperative)
Let’s sing! (hortative)

exhort = strongly encourage or urge (someone) to do something.



Optative
Hortative
Imperative

Later.