Google, you have gone and threw us for a loop. Though you’ve always been incredibly straight-laced and conservative in terms of your approach to design, I did not see your foray into novel forms of comedy.
Just yesterday, you announced that all videos on YouTube will have the ability to be auto-captioned using your voice recognition technology. The results, truly, are outstanding: not for their accuracy, but for their value as pure comic gold.
Observe, for example, the following video:
In order to get started, with the embedded view above you must start playing; then choose the upward facing arrow in the bottom right corner; from the popup that results, select CC, and then “Transcribe Audio (BETA)”. From there, rotten underbelly of what seems to be a benign product announcement comes clear:
The video starts off cryptic, meaning illusive: “before” .. “no month” .. “wolf” .. “the boe’s abortion” (0:20). A divorce then ensues: “yes your honor that’s for sure they can that’s divorce worth it if that’s the case it would be fun” (4:34). The FBI is then involved in constant beatings: “quarter of these the FBI .. many many years trying to stop the beating” (6:19).
Google also adds social networking and the dangers of online harassment to the product held in review, a fact that would otherwise not be apparent by the actual words they used: “the youtube facebook that his son is what concerns the first harassment” (6:57), then instantly turning to matters of national security: “the the meantime terrorist cells that such and this one has .. so what is the President refuses to think that these the same diagnosed with some useful” (7:03).
Google then finds evidence of cultural history: “no and early eighty’s people here in a lab would be the fourth pretend to have the years the postal service reversals” (7:35) Politics then comes back at the forefront: “Clinton the other side’s truce so” (8:21). Obama, too, was certainly mentioned, though I’m not finding the reference in scrubbing through again.
Maybe this will get old and I’ll stop laughing; but for the time being I’m looking forward to seeing what other gems Google will derive from the bounty of the YouTubes. It’s a Dadaist’s dreamland, created by some fussy algorithms which might make YouTube worth watching for the first time in its history.