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

Google added a feature to YouTube that plays back comments. Is it serious or a response to a cartoon lampooning the inanity of YouTube comments?

[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.