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I made a talking banana

I made a talking banana on HackerTube: recommended by 3 Hacker News commenters across 3 separate months, 2018–2023.

Useless Duck Company

comedy · evergreen

Open on YouTube

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 recommends it

HN shares it as a funny, technical story about phonetic profanity filtering, relevant to Soundex and content moderation threads.

people recommended it
3
separate months
3
strong recommendations
1
discussed on HN
2018–2023
“terrific little video about the battle between him and his viewers”
— hbosch, Jun 2018, in “How Peppa Pig became a video nightmare for children”

What HN commenters said

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

hboschJun 2018Strongly recommends

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

tonfreedOct 2021Recommends

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

raszMay 2018Recommends

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

in “Soundex” · View on HN

nomelJun 2023Cites it

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

sorenjanOct 2021Cites it

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

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