Goals
1) Develop a phone app that helps people of all ages learn to sign with Koko
2) Teach many of Koko’s favorite signs (both ASL and natural gestures) demonstrated by Koko herself
3) Enable people to learn all 1000+ of Koko’s signs with help from Dr. Penny Patterson
4) Include real-world examples of Koko interacting with her caregivers and other animals, with and without sign language subtitles (for educational purposes)
5) Apply the app to facilitate “conservation through communication” especially for our fellow great apes.
Why is this Important?
All gorillas use gestures to communicate. Koko just happened to be taught one of our gestural systems — American Sign Language (ASL). Thus, the KokoSigns app will make it possible for more captive gorillas to benefit from 2-way communication — by people decoding gorilla natural gestures, as well as learning and sharing some basic ASL. It also teaches a valuable language to humans of all ages and nationalities — one that can transcend current language barriers, and has the potential to facilitate communication between hearing and deaf communities. Communication fosters empathy, and empathy is a pre-requisite for both true conservation and improved captive care.
Approach
1) The Koko Signs app has 4 main sections:
Signs: Learn Koko’s favorite signs by looking them up by name, category or description. Each sign features a video clip of Koko demonstrating the way she does the sign, another clip of native ASL signer (and former gorilla caregiver) Darlene Chan demonstrating the correct ASL version, and a third clip of Penny Patterson demonstrating the differences between Koko and ASL (if they exist).
Conversations: Short videos of Koko communicating with humans in sign language are provided as examples of her using multiple signs, and to give insight about her personality (both as an individual and as a gorilla). When you look up a sign, you will automatically see all Conversation videos that include that sign, and when you click on the video, you’ll see a list of the signs that appear in the video with their timecodes. You can click on a Sign in the list and either jump to that Sign in the Conversation video, or learn the Sign by watching Koko (, Penny and/or Darlene) demonstrate it. Conversely, you can look up Conversation videos, and learn all of the signs within each video.
Books: The Koko Signs app comes with several of our most popular books about Koko (and friends) loaded, as e-books: Koko’s Kitten, Koko’s Story, and Michael’s Dream. In addition to reading these books, as e-books, you can click on the Signs that appear as part of the book’s dialogue, and a popup of Koko demonstrating the sign will appear.
Gorillas: The Gorillas section has 2 subsections:
— Why Help Them? Describes the crises facing gorillas in both the wild, and in captive settings, and suggests solutions. One of the key solutions is to increase human empathy for gorillas by exposing more people (and gorillas) to interspecies communication.
— KokoCasts: This is our new video podcast series, featuring interviews by Gorilla Foundation staff of world experts on gorillas (and other great apes), conservation and interspecies communication. Some of the KokoCasts feature students, who are invited to add their perspective, both through questions and suggestions about how to advance gorilla conservation and care, using interspecies communication and/or other tools at our disposal.
2) The app also has the following Special Features (in its “More …” menu):
- KokoGrams
- About the App
- About Koko
- About The Gorilla Foundation
- Donate
- Shop
- Contact Us
Progress
1) After a full year of design and development with a world-class app development company, ArcTouch, the Koko Signs app (v1.0) was ready for public release in December 2023.
2) A pre-release version was made available to Gorilla Foundation donors in November. The public version contains a few enhancements made possible by the feedback obtained during the pre-release period.
Plans
1) Koko Signs v1.0 was released on both Apple and Android app stores in late December 2023.
2) We will be making regular updates to both content and features, such as adding more signs, conversations and KokoCasts (as new content), and including self-testing and conservation curricular (as new features) [2024]
3) We will be testing the efficacy of Koko Signs for gorilla conservation starting January 2024, by partnering with a conservation education school in Uganda, and a group of Baku students living near the gorilla forests in Cameroon, Africa.
4) Detailed feedback forms will be sent to all Koko Signs users (via the app) to help optimize it’s use for: a) sign language learning, b) familiarity with gorillas Koko, Michael and Ndume, c) conservation education, and d) interspecies communication.
5) We experiment with using the Koko Signs app as a tool to help us learn more about gorilla natural gestures, and to evaluate the scientific results of Project Koko, through collaborative translation of our archival videos.
