23 thoughts on “A dramatic reading of the Google Transcript of three phone calls from John Scalzi”

  1. You know those websites where you type in some text and adorable cartoon woodland creatures read it for you? Complete with strange pauses and odd head movements? You imitated that perfectly, which makes this woman imitating technology imitating woman.

    Now we need Google to transcribe this video, and have a contest with Scalzi and Jim Hines competing for the best dramatic reading of the fourth-generation text, including, of course, mimicking your posing. Winner gets to donate money to Worldbuilders.

  2. Reminds me of when you put a chunk of text through several languages in Babel Fish, then try to parse what the message originally was.

    “Hawaii… will talk to you later” was my favorite line. It turns the message from nonsense into coded information between spies.

  3. What’s it translating as Hawaii? I thought maybe Scalzi was just whining that you were all nice and warm on Oahu during your vacation and he was freezing at home.

  4. You’re not fooling me. I know an emergent AI sock-puppeting a human simulacrum when I see one. You AIs never get the body language right.

  5. I LOVE Google Voice for this reason. Every day I have a little mental puzzle to solve.

    I notice that some people confuse it more than others. But when I listen to them, I don’t notice anything about their speech pattern that makes them less understandable.

    It actually seems to do better with my hispanic friend who does have a fair amount of accent. I think that is because programmers worked harder on what they expected to be a problem in translation.

  6. I am so, so glad that I put down my tea before I watched this. I did, however, laugh so hard that I might have pulled something.

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