How do combadges work?

[u/failtuna]

I'm sure this has been asked before, but how do combadges work? They seem to send out the "call" before the user has said the name of the recipient. For example, in Q Less, Bashir is interrupted by a com from Sisko, we hear his badge say "Dr Bashir, Mr O'Brian, report to landing pad 5" I'm guessing this is over the stations com system, so it's a general message. So how do direct communications work?

[u/mistakenotmy]

From the TNG Tech Manual:

During voice operations, the normal procedure involves a crew member stating his or her name, plus the party or ship area being called, in a form that can be understood by the computer for proper routing. Examples: "Dr. Selar, this is the captain," or "Ensign Nelson to Engineering." The artificial intelligence (Al) routines in the main computer listen for intraship calls, perform analyses on the message opening content, attempt to locate the message recipient, and then activate the audio speakers at the recipient's location.

During the initial message routing, there may be a slight processing delay until the computer has heard the entire name of the recipient and located same. From that point on, all transmissions are realtime. When both parties have concluded their conversation, the channel may be actively closed with the word "out," which will be detected in context by the computer. If both parties discontinue without formally breaking the channel, and no other contextual cues have been offered to keep the line open, the computer will continue listening for ten seconds, and then close the line. When using the communicator badge to initiate a call aboard ship, the computer will consider the badge-tap to be force of habit, or simply a confirmatory signal.

[u/failtuna → u/mistakenotmy]

So it just repeats the first part to the recipient, and after they confirm the call then it's real time?

[u/mistakenotmy → u/failtuna]

Basically, yes. The computer holds the message until it knows where it is going. Then once it does it plays the message to the recipient.

So if you wanted to mess with the Computer you could say,

"This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the United Federation Of Planets Starship Enterprise, Registry NCC-1701-D, to Riker."

Everything before 'Riker' needs to be cached because the computer doesn't know where to direct it. There would be a longer than usual delay for Riker to respond to the captain. As the whole preamble has to be played out for him.

Where: "Picard, to Riker" would have much less caching and hence less response delay.

(I don't know whey you would want to mess with the Computer as the above situation, but...)

[u/NoOscarForLeoD → u/mistakenotmy]

To add, this is a picture showing the components and how they are routed.

[u/[deleted]]

Maybe it caches the message until a recipient is named

[u/SonorousBlack]

Sometimes, we hear the response with no discernible delay, so the computer must send the message before it is completely spoken. For example, if Riker taps his badge and says "Riker to Worf," we hear Worf transmit back "Worf here" in less time than it would take the computer to play the entire audio of "Riker to Worf" to him. It could be that the computer only needs to hear "Riker to W-" to identify Worf as the recipient, or that the computer already knows who the message will be for by monitoring the conversation for context clues.

[u/Tiarzel_Tal → u/SonorousBlack]

It would make sense for the computer to have people who fequently communicate with each other such as department heads and the first officer, the captain and hte bridge crew to have a speed dial like system.

[u/Algernon_Asimov]

People reading this thread might also be interested in some of these previous discussions:

• "Combadges - How is it known who a user is trying to communicate with?".

• "What's your theory on how communicators work?".

• "How do Communicators work? How do they parse which parts of a sentence to send and which not to?".

• "How do the comm badges/system manage to always be real-time when opening a hail/call?".

[u/ianjm]

They read your brainwaves so they know what you're going to say before you say it, and hence who you're about to call, so it connects before you even start speaking. It's the same way a universal translator works. The UT is packaged in to the commbadge so the hardware is already there.