How many times have you looked lovingly at your suffering Aralia, begging it to tell you what it wants, what you’re doing wrong? You would do anything to make it happy, you explain lovingly. It just sulks in the corner, silently judging you.

Finally, we can communicate. Botanicalls, a project of Kate Hartman, Kati London, Rebecca Bray, and Rob Faludi at ITP, opens a new channel of communication between plants and humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species understanding. Botanicalls allows plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the Botanicalls network needs water, it can call a person and ask for exactly what it needs. When people phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their habits and characteristics.

How does it work? Based on sensor information, plants are able to place outgoing phone calls to a nearby telephone and express their needs. All phone calls are coordinated by Asterisk, an open-source telephone system. When a plant’s microcontroller determines that the plant needs to make a phone call, it contacts a PHP script with the plant’s ID number and type of need. PHP then packages this information and passes it on to Asterisk which generates the call. When the call is placed, an audio file in played in the voice of the plant expressing its need.

Current call types are as follows:
-a request for water
-a confirmation of & thanks for watering
-a request for more water if initial watering was not sufficient
-a notification of unnecessary watering
-a notification of extreme need for watering when plant is excessively dry

You can talk to the plants now at 212.202.8348. But once we establish a strong relationship, couldn’t we just email or SMS?

Plants aren’t the only species that need reliable sources of water… Check out events for World Water Day today (March 22) in your area.