Talk Obama To Me: App Analysis

 

When said by the former President of the United States, something definitely sounds weighty; which is why a new text-to-speech internet app called “Talk Obama to me” is so pleasant. All you have to do is type whatever text you want to have it read by the ex-President Mr. Barack Obama himself.

What Is It About?

The software is a “video speech synthesiser that automatically chops up video of Barack Obama and puts in order, so that he says whatever you want him to”, according to developer and Stanford Linguistics PhD candidate, Ed King.

If there’s no Obama clip saying an entire word, it’s broken into phonetic sounds, which makes for a pretty choppy video. It works with varying degrees of success.

For an experimental app, though, it’s amazing and it’s pretty enjoyable as it is – for starters, we got the head of the free world to recite Game of Throne’s Night Watch pledge.

To Search On

Look for “Obama mash up” online and you can find all sorts of smartly edited videos of President Obama singing famous songs like ‘Sorry’ by Justin Bieber or Mark Ronson’s “UpTown Funk” or “Thriller” by Michael Jackson. They’re hilarious.

Online popularity has been found by channels like ‘Baracksdubs’ with videos that blend clips from the speeches of President Obama to make him “sing” the lyrics of popular songs. These “dub” videos are so common that even Jimmy Falon has jumped on the wagon. The President can speak any sentence a user enters via the website called Talk Obama To Me.

‘Talk Obama To Me’ provides no editing software, so you never come out of it with a video that sounds as smooth as a traditionally Baracksdubs video, regardless of what phrases you put in. Nevertheless, if you can get it to work, the project is fun to play with.

Talk Obama To Me has undergone a lot of downtime since getting widespread media attention over the last few days. Maybe we need a declaration to back up and run our servers.

King said that the response the site received was absolutely incredible. “I had thought it might get some notice from people who are interested in tech or linguistics, but this is so far beyond what I could have hoped”, he added.

The only downside in popularity was the server problems, but King said he’s working hard to fix them.

However, he said the site ‘always comes back in a couple of minutes.’

Go give it a try for yourself and have fun.

Written by - Khadija Kapasi

Edited by - Keerthana Lakshmi