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Burnistoun - Voice Recognition Elevator in Scotland

Burnistoun - Voice Recognition Elevator in Scotland on HackerTube: recommended by 1 Hacker News commenter across 1 month, 2015–2018.

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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 recommends it

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

people recommended it
1
separate months
1
strong recommendations
1
discussed on HN
2015–2018
“I have regularly thrown laughing fits over this.”
— sdruskat, May 2018, in “Ask HN: What you watch to laugh?”

What HN commenters said

5 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

sdruskatMay 2018Strongly recommends

- 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.

in “Ask HN: What you watch to laugh?” · View on HN

pjc50Oct 2017Joke

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.

in “Speech Recognition Is Not Solved” · View on HN

pjc50Sep 2016Joke

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.

in “A.I. Doesn't Get Black Twitter” · View on HN

panglottFeb 2016Joke

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

in “The Unsuitability of English (2015)” · View on HN

arethuzaOct 2015Joke

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]

in “Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile” · View on HN

Topics & tags

Stand-up & sketch comedySatire & parodyComputer vision, speech & NLPburnistounsketch comedyspeech recognitionscottish accentelevator