I made a talking banana

Useless Duck Company · 621.6K views · 2018-05-15 · 17:41

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2018–2023

Topics

Embedded systems & DIY electronics Language & linguistics Free speech, censorship & civil liberties

What people said

hbosch · 2018-06 · Strong recommendation
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. * [VIDEO]
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tonfreed · 2021-10 · Recommendation
You say that there's no "non-hacky" way, but... [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
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rasz · 2018-05 · Recommendation
If you are interested in phonetic algorithms, sorting, recognizing and filtering, you will enjoy Talking Banana Twitch ban story by Useless Duck Company : [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by Useless Duck Company, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

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