Bad subtitles

[techieMoe]

One form of humor I find absolutely hilarious is when characters in a normally English show try their hand at a foreign language and end up saying something monumentally stupid, for instance:

<Intended sentence in foreign language>

"Hello. Could you please get out of our back yard?"

<Actual translated sentence>

"Slippery breath inside banjo melted. Runny Smoky."

(The above was loosely quoted from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, season 2.)

Why am I bringing this up? Well, computers have trouble understanding human speech sometimes, as this article humorously demonstrates.

[fingal]

Heh - I saw that demo on video but I thought it was a spoof. MS seem to have a history of failed demos which are indeed very amusing. What I liked was the statement made by the demon-strator (hyphen intentional) that 'It's background noise'!

There's always going to be background noise of some sort, and potentially there are going to be annual reports floating around with 'Remember to get the cat in for the night' or maybe snippets of whatever film is playing on TV ... Films like Goodfellas and One Night in Paris.

[Cabhan]

Hah, that was great.

Wasn't in Windows 98 or something where they were showing off its stability and it bluescreened?

[techieMoe]

Hah, that was great.

Wasn't in Windows 98 or something where they were showing off its stability and it bluescreened?

According to Wikipedia it was a Windows 98 demo at COMDEX:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...27660275444169

But I don't mean to make this a bash Microsoft thread, just a "isn't human language funny, particularly when paired with technology" thread.

[Cabhan]

Ah true. My apologies.

I'm just glad they didn't try the word "duck" .

[techieMoe]

Ah true. My apologies.

I'm just glad they didn't try the word "duck" .

That reminds me of a funny story involving a child's toy that talked. (Well, at least the girlfriend I had at the time and I found it funny.) Some time ago I was perusing a Target store with one of my now ex-girlfriends when we walked by the toy section. We were kind of bored so we started walking by random displays and playing with the toys.

One toy was an educational toy for toddlers which consisted of a rainbow-colored caterpillar about a foot long. Each of his legs corresponded to a letter of the alphabet. You could toggle a switch and the toy would either say the name of the letter (for instance "S") or make the sound of that letter (for instance "sss"). My g/f and I immediately tried to get it to say something naughty by hitting the F and K keys one after another. The sounds that came out were as follows:

"Fuh"
"Hee hee, that tickles. Kuh."

The "Hee hee, that tickles" only showed up when you tried to press two letters in sequence that formed an expletive, so apparently the designers of the toy had adults like myself in mind. So much for corrupting young minds.

[fingal]

That's a good one Moe! I don't have a lot of experience with voice based human/computer interaction, except for once when I was still a student. I lived in a hall of residence with 4 other people: an assorted bunch of engineers and IT undergraduates.

One of them had a programme called something like Dr. Tsubo (phonetic as I can't remember exactly) which was supposed to be able to psychoanalyse you. In fact, it just used the well worn trick of recycling your comments, running them through an algorithm and repeating back whatever you just said.

One of my friends was doing engineering and hated it! He had to write a programme in Fortran and had no idea what to do. The conversation he had with Dr. Tsubo was something like:

Dr. Tsubo: How do you feel?
Simon: I'm suicidal.
Dr. Tsubo: Have you always been suicidal?
Simon: Only since I started programming in Fortran.
Dr. Tsubo: How do you feel about Fortran?
Simon: Suicidal! Can you help me?
Dr. Tsubo: How do you want me to help you?

And so on for a long time. One day I walked into my friend's room and he was running the programme in voice synth. mode. The machine was saying: 'That was a wonderful essay Chris! Well done! I hope the next one is as superb as that.' Somehow a synthetic voice saying that sounds funny. A bit like HAL in 2001 a Space Oddessy. No wonder you wanted that toy to swear - at least that helps you identify with the thing.

[techieMoe]

One of them had a programme called something like Dr. Tsubo (phonetic as I can't remember exactly) which was supposed to be able to psychoanalyse you. In fact, it just used the well worn trick of recycling your comments, running them through an algorithm and repeating back whatever you just said.

There was an old Mac program called Eliza (back in the Motorola 68K Mac days) that did this very same thing. It was a riot sometimes.