Feature or Google's sense of humor? Audio tool speaks your YouTube comments

Ask and ye shall receive.

At least if the supplicant is the Net's most prominent techie cartoonist and Google is in a position to fulfill the request.

In late September, I chuckled at Randall Munroe's XKCD cartoon about living to regret YouTube comments. The cartoon suggested a virus that would read people's YouTube comments back to them before they posted. The result was the mass realization that we're all a bunch of morons, which, judging by the average YouTube comment I see, doesn't seem too far off the mark.

Well, lo and behold, such a thing now exists, as Google Blogoscoped pointed out Thursday, though alas not with the mandatory listen-before-you-post requirement Munroe suggested. Google added a text-to-speech button that will play back your comments.

YouTube comments, now with a text-to-speech engine.

(Credit: CNET News)

Is it a coincidence? Speak your mind in the comments below, and I'll update if Google gets back to me with a response.

Though I could be persuaded otherwise. I suspect it's evidence of Google being witty, mostly because I'm having trouble figuring out the utility of the feature besides to show off what I see as a generally pretty impressive text-to-speech engine. Perhaps they're trying to see how well the engine can handle a little more load.

It would be more useful if there were some way to train the audio engine when it flubs, as it does with some foreign terms and proper nouns, or at least let it know its errors. I was impressed it could handle some awkward terms, though, including "CNET" and "syzygy." It runs out of available syllables before the comments field runs out of room for words, though it seems well suited to the typically brief, if inane, YouTube comment.

Update 7:52 a.m. PDT: Matt Cutts, Google's Web spam guru, believes the audio feature is indeed a hat-tip to XKCD. "I love that Google had the sense of humor to add this feature," he said.

Also, Munroe himself remarks on his own blog about the audio feature, aptly pointing to one commenter's post: "It's the DUMBEST FEATURE I've seen thus far. There is no practical use for it. None. Zero. Nada. Sheesh. (The audio preview of my own post sounded moronic!)"

[dascha1]

You forgot accessibility in your own Tags field.

yes, there is absolutely no practical application to getting free publicity and getting tens of thousands of people to go stress test a product for you (with NO expectations other than "what's this")

I suppose it also wouldn't be of even the tiniest side benefit for them to be able to cut down on the inane posts that are eating up CPU time (open sockets, db reads/writes, etc) on their servers, or that cutting down on the amount of "navel gazing" on youtube might not make it easier to convince advertisers to run their ads alongside of user created content.

To repeat the immortal wisdom of a certain cartoon character: "Nothing to see here, move along now."

[TV James]

Please bring text-to-speech to Google Reader. Pleasepleasepleaseplease.

[SWLinPHX]

I don't get it. The Mac OS has come automatically equipped with text-to-speech built-in along with a variety of voices (with adjustable rates and pitches even) since the mid-1990's. Any text you can highlight or copy be can read directly from the menu bar using the speech function. This also goes for all alert messages, etc. I'll admit back then it was fun to try out voices and see what interesting words it knew or could pronounce. It was also interesting to see if it knew how to pronounce certain words depending on context (such as "read", as "reed" or "red"). But it seems PC users still find this a novelty. Then again, all Macs have also come with sound and mics since then, whereas I remember sound being only an optional add-on for PCs pretty much until the new millennium.