3.4M views · Sep 7, 2011 · 3:37 · 1 HN recommender · 5 mentions · discussed 2015–2018
A Burnistoun sketch from BBC Scotland in which two men try to use a voice-recognition elevator that cannot understand their Scottish accents.
Why Hacker News points people here: Posted as the obligatory joke in any thread about speech recognition, and recommended in a thread on what makes people laugh.
“I have regularly thrown laughing fits over this.”HN comment, 2018
“I have regularly thrown laughing fits over this.”
Scottish sketch comedy that causes laughing fits
- 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.
Well, I'm Scottish and I don't have a particularly strong accent (at least by the standard of Scottish accents) and my accent appears to be beyond any kind of voice technology (Apple or Android). this video [NSFWOS]
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
“Obligatory Burnistoun”
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.
“Obligatory "voice recognition lift in Scotland" comedy sketch”
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.
