A Dedenne's whiskers are capable of receiving electronic signals, and these pokemon are well-known for their role in the history of computing; the term "mouse" on a computer did not initially refer to the often Minun-patterned devices being supplanted by touchpads today. However, this was not the first usage of Dedenne's whiskers, for their initial association with electronics, now all but forgotten, predates vacuum tubes by nearly a century.

Before humans learned to use radios to transmit sounds, they experimented with a variety of other uses for the radio spectrum, and many scientists (and non-scientists in the vicinity of laboratories) noticed that the local Dedenne population began to speak in unison after each of these experiments. It was soon discovered that the Dedenne understand radio waves as messages – a mysterious ability speculated to have evolved as a reaction to dangerous cosmic phenomena – and repeat the radio messages to pokemon far and wide. This fact proved to have far more potential than the initial avenues of radio research, and science soon learned which frequencies corresponded to which reactions from these pokemon.

With this discovery, ship captains, pilots, and world governments began to use the Dedenne as a means to send long-distance messages through radio transmitters. Dedenne can not speak human languages, so a translation code was devised, translating combinations of syllables to letters; the sentences formed this way were gibberish to the confused Dedenne speaking them, but understood by those who operated radios. But once this technology had become commonplace, science sought to improve on the slow and cumbersome Dedenne code, and experimented until they figured out how to build artificial radios based on Dedenne whiskers with speakers attached capable of transmitting human speech. With this invention, the living radios called Dedenne were made obsolete until the age of computers.