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Frame from Burnistoun - Voice Recognition Elevator in Scotland Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Burnistoun - Voice Recognition Elevator in Scotland

VideoFunStation
Comedy
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this comedy video1 month2015–2018 score 1.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Posted as the obligatory joke in any thread about speech recognition, and recommended in a thread on what makes people laugh.

A Burnistoun sketch from BBC Scotland in which two men try to use a voice-recognition elevator that cannot understand their Scottish accents.

“I have regularly thrown laughing fits over this.” (HN, 2018)

1 strong recommendations · 4 jokes · Comedy

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@sdruskat May 2018 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Ask HN: What you watch to laugh?
- Burnistoun (sample here: [this video] , [link] ): I have regularly thrown laughing fits over this. - Hardy Bucks ( [link] , [link] ) Tech-wise, Silicon Valley I think is funny esp. the earlier series.
Scottish sketch comedy that causes laughing fits

Citations, criticism and jokes

@panglott Feb 2016 Makes a joke
on HN thread The Unsuitability of English (2015)
Read more
We will not have a technological Babel fish until we have portable (power-efficient) computers that are both 1. roughly as or more intelligent as a human and 2. understands the world in the same way as a human, including both semantics and pragmatics of such things as humor. This is not anything realistic in anything like the near term. Most of the automated translation software I've used can't even handle something like deixis through a text between two such well-studied and similar languages as English and Spanish. You're talking about a device that could translate between Scots, Tamil, and Huasteca Nahuatl. [this video]
@pjc50 Sep 2016 Makes a joke
on HN thread A.I. Doesn't Get Black Twitter
Obligatory Burnistoun: [this video] I thought most people would be able to get written Scots dialect, but I did struggle with Walter Scott's Rob Roy where one of the characters speaks it phonetically. There's also a guy doing a newspaper column in Scots in The National, causing quite a bit of controversy. Spoken language is another matter. I've had to interpret between an Ulsterman and an Afrikaaner both of whom were nominally speaking English as a first language.
@pjc50 Oct 2017 Makes a joke
on HN thread Speech Recognition Is Not Solved
Obligatory "voice recognition lift in Scotland" comedy sketch: [this video] Personally I've had to "translate" between a South African and an Ulsterman before, both of whom were speaking English but with extremely different accents.

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