Lost In Translation

So the new Google voice search app [iTunes link] just became available for iPhones late yesterday and boy are we having fun with it. Sometimes you get what you asked for and sometimes you get something totally wrong. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get something totally wrong that is very funny, relatively speaking, to what you were looking for in the first place. For example, I confess that I couldn’t resist asking for pornography and found myself delighted to be sent to My Little Pony.

Voice recognition is nothing new. Call 411 and odds are high you have to deal with some dumbass computer chick who embodies (or, actually disembodies) artificial unintelligence. She asks what you want, you tell her, and she either gets it wrong or doesn’t get it at all, leading to One moment please, one moment please… while you’re redirected to a human, which is what your original goal was anyway. For some reason, this just does not tickle our funny bones the same way well-intentioned, poorly executed Google voice searches do.

On the other hand, the humor is akin to Alta Vista’s BabelFish, the language translator. For that program, you type something in your native language and translate to any number of other languages. If you don’t happen to be bilingual, you won’t be able to catch the errors. But if you take the translation, feed it back in, and request that it be switched back to English, it can get pretty wacky.

For example type in:
Excuse me, is that a cow you’re wearing on your head? Will you please pass the butter?

Now translate to Spanish:
Excúseme, es que una vaca you’ ¿el re usar en su cabeza? ¿Usted pasará por favor la mantequilla?

And now back to English:
Excúseme, is that one is vacant you’ re to use in its head? You will pass butter please?

Similarly, the Google App, while surprisingly successful in many instances, does offer up its fair share of gaffes and misunderstandings. So, while I said, Olivia Newton John and immediately received the official ONJ website as my first hit, when Michael tried Bangladesh, the search returned results for plenty of fish.

I think if you speak into the mic as if talking to a very old, stone deaf relative who doesn’t speak English as a first language, you might have better results. And, neat side feature, during the search the screen displays a visual of your audio — that is you can see a graph of your tones going up and down. Speak too softly and you get a sort of flat line effect.

Julie’s played with it the most, and here are some of her results:

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I’m thinking there’s a game waiting to be invented in all this. Remember the “Magic iPod Game” invented in honor of those old Magic Eight Balls? The gist of it was, you ask a question out loud in front of friends. Then you hit shuffle on the iPod and a song comes up which reveals your answer. So maybe you ask, Should I break up with my boyfriend? and you get, Hit the Road Jack, and, voila, you show your boyfriend the door. (And later, when he finds out how you came to your decision, he takes a hammer to your iPod.)

So what game can we come up with here with this new app?