Moving an Elephant, Police Use AI, Soft and Hard Skills

Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Mario Ritter, Jr. This program is designed for English learners, so we speak a little slower and we use words and phrases especially written for people learning English. Today, Ana Mateo and Andrew Smith tell us about an elephant named Charlie, and the elephant moving experts who helped Charlie find a happier life. John Russell presents this week's technology report. Finally, we hear today's lesson of the day. But first… When it comes to the business of moving elephants, Dr. Amir Khalil and his team might be the best. The work experience of this Egyptian animal doctor includes possibly the most famous elephant relocation ever. In 2020, Khalil's team saved Kavan, an Asian elephant, from years of loneliness at a zoo in Pakistan. They flew him to Cambodia, where he could live a happier life at an elephant reserve. At the time, Kavan was called the world's loneliest elephant. The relocation project was a great success, but Kavan was not the only elephant that needed help. Next on the list was the last captive elephant in South Africa. Charlie, an aging African elephant, had outlived all the other elephants at a zoo in Pretoria. The zoo was Charlie's home for more than 20 years. Wildlife experts say that elephants are sensitive animals. And Charlie was showing signs of being deeply unhappy since his partner, Landa, died in 2020. Zoo officials decided he should enjoy his final years in a better place for an old elephant. His new home would be a large private game reserve some 200 kilometers away. There, he would be able to make some new elephant friends. As an animal rescue specialist at the Four Paws Wildlife Welfare Organization, Khalil was a clear choice for this massive job. Captured as a young calf in western Zimbabwe in the 1980s, Charlie was taken from his herd. He spent 16 years in a South African circus. He then spent 23 years as the main attraction at Pretoria's National Zoological Garden. Zookeepers estimate Charlie is 42 years old. He has spent 40 years in captivity. I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people and children witnessed and enjoyed Charlie, said Khalil. I think it's time for him to also enjoy life and to live as an elephant. Elephants are highly intelligent, highly social animals, Khalil said. While Charlie was unhappy, he could also be naughty and playful. Khalil compared Charlie's last few sad years at the zoo to someone watching the same movie every day, alone. The technical parts of moving an elephant to a new home are complex. Khalil does not put the elephants to sleep. This is mainly because it is not good for such a big animal. But also, a sleeping elephant is hardly any easier to move. And so, a process began of training an old elephant to step willingly into a large metal transport container. At some point, Khalil and his team would load Charlie into this container. Two other animal doctors, Dr. Marina Ivanova and Dr. Frank Goretz, worked with Khalil as part of the Kavan relocation team. They first met Charlie two years ago. The meetings were meant to help the doctors decide how ready he was to move. They were also meant to help them earn Charlie's trust. The interactions were carefully controlled. They involved teaching Charlie to respond to calls, to walk up to a training wall that has spaces in it for the team to offer him a food reward. In Charlie's case, pumpkins, papaya, and beetroot are his favorites. The same process was finally used to attract Charlie into the transport container. It was thought that it might take many months for Charlie to learn to step happily into the container. But he was ready to go after less than two weeks of training. He was curious and thinking, what is this new toy, said Ivanova. In late August, after an hour's long road trip on the back of a truck, Charlie moved into his new home at the Shambhala Private Game Reserve. This is a huge change for Charlie. So he will be held in an area separate from the main park for a few weeks to let him get used to his new home, the team said. The park contains wild elephant herds that Charlie may join. Khalil said it is still very rare for captive elephants to be reintroduced to a wild setting. He praised zoo and government officials for permitting this project to go ahead. It's a great message from South Africa that even an old elephant deserves a new chance, he said. At Shambhala, Charlie will be a wild elephant for the first time in 40 years, with thousands of hectares of land to explore. He will have the freedom to take a mud bath. The animal doctors note that elephants are known to have a good memory, so Charlie may remember his life as a calf before he was captured. Charlie is already making contact with the other elephants in the park from his holding pen, Ivanova said. Elephants use deep rumbles to communicate. Those deep sounds can be heard five kilometers away. I hear him rumbling, said Ivanova happily. We'll help him turn into a wild elephant again. I'm Ana Mateo. And I'm Andrew Smith. Some police departments in the United States are experimenting with artificial intelligence, or AI, tools to help them produce incident reports. Police officers who have tried the AI chatbots praise the technology as a time-saver. Yet some government lawyers, legal experts, and others have expressed concerns about the AI-produced reports. One chatbot police are testing uses the same technology as ChatGPT. The company that sells it, Axon, is best known for developing the electroshock weapon called the Taser. It is also the leading supplier of body cameras in the U.S. Matt Gilmore is a police officer in Oklahoma's capital, Oklahoma City. He describes the AI chatbot as a game-changer for police work. Recently, Gilmore and his police dog, Gunner, searched for a group of suspects for almost an hour. In the past, after completing a search, the officer would spend another 30 to 45 minutes writing up a report about the incident. But this time he used AI. The tool considered all the sounds and radio talk recorded by the microphone attached to Gilmore's body camera. Then it produced a report. The process took eight seconds. It was a better report than I could have ever written, and it was 100% accurate. It flowed better, Gilmore said. The report even documented an event he did not remember. Another officer identifying the color of the car from which the suspects fled. The new AI product is called DraftOne. Axon's founder and CEO Rick Smith said it received the most positive reaction of any tool the company has offered. They become police officers because they want to do police work, and spending half their day doing data entry is just a tedious part of the job that they hate, Smith said. But he also noted legal and ethical concerns about the tool. He said government lawyers prosecuting criminal cases want to be sure that police officers are responsible for writing their reports. Sometimes, officers are called to testify in court about cases they worked on. Prosecutors never want to get an officer on the stand who says, well, the AI wrote that, I didn't, Smith said. AI technology is not new to police agencies. American police already use such tools to read license plates, identify suspects' faces, recognize the sounds of gunshots, and predict where crimes will happen. In Oklahoma City, police showed the tool to local prosecutors before using it for criminal cases. The lawyers advised the police to be careful with the tool. For now, it is used only for minor incident reports that do not lead to arrests. So no arrests, no felonies, no violent crimes, said Oklahoma City Police Captain Jason Bussert, the head of information technology for the 1,170-officer department. Police in the city of Lafayette, Indiana, have a different policy on the new tool. Police Chief Scott Galloway told the Associated Press that officers can use Draft One for every incident. He said the tool is very popular with the city force. It began using the tool earlier this year. Police in Fort Collins, Colorado, are also permitted to use the AI tool on any kind of report. However, the head of the force's technology department said the tool does not work well in very noisy parts of the city. Axon will not say how many police departments are using Draft One. Other companies, including Police Reports AI and Trulio, offer similar tools. Experts and police officials expect AI-generated reports to become more common in the coming months and years. Some experts and observers are calling for public discussion about the use of AI tools to write police reports. Chatbots that use AI technology are not mistake-free. Sometimes these chatbots can produce false information. That issue worries Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at American University. I am concerned that automation and the ease of the technology would cause police officers to be sort of less careful with their writing, he said. Ferguson said a police report is important in determining whether an officer's suspicion supports someone's loss of liberty. It is sometimes the only testimony a judge sees in a court case, particularly for minor crimes known as misdemeanors. Human-created police reports also have problems, Ferguson noted. He said it is not yet known which kind of report writer, human or AI, is more dependable. I'm John Russell. You just heard this week's technology report. Now, John Russell joins me to talk a bit more about it. Hi John, welcome. Hi Ashley, thanks for having me on the show. In the report, a police officer is quoted as describing new AI software as a game changer. Can you talk a bit about that term? Sure. A game changer is something that changes an existing situation or activity in a major way. So, when you heard new AI software described as a game changer for police work, it means that the technology changes police work in a big way. When did this term come into use? Merriam-Webster's online dictionary tells us the first example of game changer was in 1993. It has become much more commonly used since then. Interesting. Well, thanks for telling us more about that phrase, and thank you for your report today. See you next time! VOA Learning English has launched a new program for children. It is called Let's Learn English with Anna. The new course aims to teach children American English through asking and answering questions and experiencing fun situations. For more information, visit our website, learningenglish.voanews.com Hello! My name is Anna Mateo. And my name is Jill Robbins. And I'm Andrew Smith. You're listening to the Lesson of the Day on the Learning English Podcast. Welcome to the part of the show where we help you do more with our series, Let's Learn English. The series shows Anna Mateo in her work and life in Washington, D.C. In our last Lesson of the Day, we listened closely to the pronunciation of a small but important word, the verb can. We also listened to the verb's negative forms, cannot and can't. In today's lesson, we're going to connect this small word to something important Anna wants her friend, Pete, to know. In Lesson 20 of Let's Learn English, Pete looks sad. Anna wants to know why. And then she gives him some important advice. Let's listen to the beginning of Lesson 20. Hi there! Washington, D.C. is a great place to work. Many people here work in government and politics. But there are many other jobs. You can work at a hospital, a university. You can work in a coffee shop. Wait a minute. I think I see a friend of mine. Pete, is that you? Hi, Anna. You look different. Your beard is really big. You don't like it, do you? No, no. You just look different. So what's wrong? You look sad. I don't have a job. Sorry, I can't hear you. I do not have a job. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, Pete. I don't have a skill. Everyone has a skill. You need to find yours. Anna said something really important in those last two sentences. Let's hear them one more time. Everyone has a skill. You need to find yours. Your skills are special knowledge and abilities that help you do something well. For many skills, you need time and training to develop them. For example, doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers, musicians, and athletes all have special skills that take time to develop. In Lesson 20, when Pete is not feeling good about himself, he doesn't think he has any useful skills. Jill, I think this is a feeling that perhaps some of our listeners can relate to. Maybe they have felt the same way from time to time. Yeah, me too. And you know, what's interesting to me is that sometimes people cannot really see the skills they do have. That's right. It takes another person to help them see what skills they have. And that's what happens in Lesson 20. Anna helps Pete realize that he does have some skills. Let's listen. No, I can't code. I can't teach. I can't cook. Anna, I can't do anything. This is sad. I'm going to write about my feelings in my blog. You write a blog? Yeah, I write a blog. How many followers do you have? I don't know. 59,538? Pete, that's a lot of followers. You can make money writing. Writing is easy. Everyone can write. Not everyone can write well. You can be a writer. I can be a writer? I can be a writer. I can be a writer! Thanks, Anna! It can feel good to realize that you have a skill that is useful. But some skills are more obvious or easy to see than others. For example, an airline pilot has the obvious skill of knowing how to fly a plane. And we generally call these kinds of obvious skills hard skills. Other examples of hard skills are computer coding, engineering, painting, construction, automotive repair, and cooking. Hard skills are generally actions that you can see or actions that produce a product like a new computer program. But there's another category of skills and we call these soft skills. Soft skills tend to be a bit more difficult to see because they relate less to actions and things like fixing a car or a bicycle. Instead, soft skills relate to the way people think and behave with other people. For example, a soft skill can include being a good listener. The person who is a good listener might not get much attention from others or produce a product like a new computer program. So, sometimes other people do not realize how important soft skills can be. I'm Jill Robbins and you're listening to the Lesson of the Day on the Learning English Podcast. Andrew, in addition to being a good listener, what are some other soft skills? The ability to communicate well, to keep things well organized, to manage conflict or disagreements, to be creative, to keep a positive attitude, to help people connect with each other, and to think carefully to help solve problems. All of these are soft skills. I can see how all of those soft skills are important. But, I can also see how people might not even realize they have them. Or they might not realize how important those skills are. And, if you think about it, universities do not give degrees in things like being a good listener. That means it can be harder to show that you have these soft skills when you are trying to get a job. But, HR departments look for both hard skills and soft skills. So, you should list those soft skills on your resume or CV. HR stands for Human Resources. That's the area of a business or organization that deals with hiring people to work. Your resume or CV is a list of your education and work experience. Jill, what can we say about skills for learning a language? Well, there are obvious skills like speaking, reading, listening, and writing. But, there's another whole category of skills that help with language learning. And, these skills involve understanding different cultures and sometimes changing the way we communicate based on those cultures. Hmm. Do you have any examples? Sure. In some cultures, it's normal or okay to say no in a very obvious or direct way. For example, French people disagree a bit more directly than Americans. But, Japanese culture is less direct. Instead of just saying no, they might pause for a few seconds or say something like, maybe the listener is supposed to understand that the pause means no, even though the Japanese person did not say it directly. Communicating across cultures is another big and interesting topic we can talk more about in another lesson of the day. In the meantime, we invite our listeners to think about the skills they have. And, if you are feeling like heat in Lesson 20, remember that you might have skills that you are not aware of. Talk to your friends and family, the people who know you best. They might be able to tell you something about yourself that you did not know before. And, it takes skill to learn English and to understand everything from the lesson of the day on the Learning English podcast. So, we hope you feel good about your own language learning. And, keep developing your skills with all of the programs from VOA Learning English. Thanks for listening to our program. I'm Jill Robbins. And I'm Andrew Smith. program for today. Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English through stories from around the world. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Mario Ritter Jr. Thank you.