Talks to Watch

I made a talking banana

622K views · May 15, 2018 · 17:41 · 3 HN recommenders · 5 mentions · discussed 2018–2023

A maker builds a talking banana that reads YouTube and Twitch comments aloud on stream, then fights viewers who abuse it with profanity. He ends up building a pronunciation-based filter to catch bad words.

Why Hacker News points people here: HN shares it as a funny, technical story about phonetic profanity filtering, relevant to Soundex and content moderation threads.

“terrific little video about the battle between him and his viewers”HN comment, 2018

What Hacker News said 5

Strongly recommendshboschJun 2018

“terrific little video about the battle between him and his viewers”

Funny, technical tale of viewers abusing a talking banana bot

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You might enjoy this video. It’s part humor and part technical discussion on how his talking “Banana” bot was brigades by users on Twitch in an effort to make him say racist words and phrases. After he got a strike on Twitch, he patched the software and then it got circumvented... terrific little video about the battle between him and his viewers and ultimately ends with his approach to sterilizing input so that the banana couldn’t speak anything harmful. I thought it was great. * this video

in “How Peppa Pig became a video nightmare for children” · view on HN
RecommendsraszMay 2018

“you will enjoy Talking Banana Twitch ban story by Useless Duck Company”

Talking banana Twitch story involving a phonetic profanity filter

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If you are interested in phonetic algorithms, sorting, recognizing and filtering, you will enjoy Talking Banana Twitch ban story by Useless Duck Company : this video

RecommendstonfreedOct 2021

“He made a filter that did analysis of the pronunciation of the messages that were being sent.”

Builds a pronunciation-based filter for incoming messages

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You say that there's no "non-hacky" way, but... this video He made a filter that did analysis of the pronunciation of the messages that were being sent. His breakdown of it starts at around 13:30

in “The naughty username checking system used by Twitch” · view on HN
Cites itsorenjanOct 2021

“That apparently worked much better than trying to think of every permutation of characters that sounds like bad words.”

Phonetic filter beat enumerating character permutations

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Reminds me of the guy that streamed a talking banana on Twitch, where viewers could make it say things. People submitted variations of the n-word and got him banned, and after trying to filter out all character combinations he could think of he wrote a phonetic filter. That apparently worked much better than trying to think of every permutation of characters that sounds like bad words. this video

in “The naughty username checking system used by Twitch” · view on HN
Cites itnomelJun 2023

“a pretty impressive attempt to detect bad words”

Clever attempt to detect bad words so a talking banana can stream.

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Related, here's a pretty impressive attempt to detect bad words, to allow a talking banana on a Twitch live stream, without being banned: this video

in “NPM won't publish packages containing the word keygen” · view on HN