WTF? Google Has a Sense of Humor: Adds Audio Previews to YouTube Comments
YouTube is not exactly known for the depth of discourse in its comments. A few days ago, Randall Munroes's popular web comic XKCD suggested that Google should add an audio preview for all comments, so that commenters might realize how inane some of their comments really are. Now, Google has implemented exactly this feature: audio previews for YouTube comments. While the XKCD comic recommended that commenters would have to listen to a comment before posting, however, these audio previews are entirely optional.
The audio previews are actually quite impressive and can handle even relatively complex words well (think 'autohagiography' or 'schadenfreude'). You can try it out for yourself on any YouTube video.
This is clearly a project that Google had been working on before it released this fun, but relatively useless feature on YouTube. Right now, audio previews are restricted to the first 150 characters of a comment, but we envision that Google was working on this text-to-speech project to provide screen reader functionality for tools like Google Reader or Blogger.
It's also noteworthy that Google can move this fast when it wants to add a feature just to be funny, while tools like GrandCentral and other acquisitions often lingering somewhere on a server in Mountain View for years.
Here is the comic that inspired this new 'feature.'
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This is the funniest thing i have seen today :D
wtf? another rick roll video?
Very cool and clever! Looking forward to see if this has an impact on comment quality. I guess we'll find out if the button gets removed.
I think I'm too immature to use this feature. I laughed when I made it say "asshole".
It's pretty cool that YouTube did this, but I kind of doubt they implemented anything from scratch here. This would actually be incredibly simple to implement. Sure, speech synthesis is hard, but there are open source projects that do it already (see http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/) and they're not that hard to get up to speed with. And I'm sure Google has a cluster of text to speech machines already. They already do a bit of text-to-speech to make their CAPTCHAs more accessible, so they probably already have speech synthesis clusters in their data centers. It's just a matter of sending it a bit of text and playing back the audio file.
A little disappointed, I was hoping I could hear other people's comments.
comment snob - ffox plug in makes YouTube almost readable.
It rates comments based on usage and punctuation. Hides those which fall below a threshold.
It can't stop all morons, but it stops more than some.
Good post