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Very well done. And the ducks -- hilarious! Now how do you scale and vary this enough, to prevent suspicion? That's the next step. Near the end (28 min), it fel
by Tempest1981 9y ago
Very well done. And the ducks -- hilarious! Now how do you scale and vary this enough, to prevent suspicion? That's the next step. Near the end (28 min), it felt like the caller was probing with "can you hear me" to collect Lenny's canned responses. Would it be better to hang up earlier to avoid suspicion?
- jdietrich 9y ago"Lenny" is only 21 short recordings, stitched together into a crude sequence. It's a remarkably unsophisticated trick on a technical level. It wouldn't be difficult to produce dozens or hundreds of Lennies on quite a small budget. Tweak the script a bit, get someone on Fiverr to record it and you've got a new and unrecognisable Lenny MkII.
- LV-426 9y agoLenny being 'just' a bunch of unchanging messages in unchanging order made it all the funnier and more amazing to me (and it was completely brilliant before I realised). I remember first seeing it a while ago, posted here, ironically (or perhaps naturally) in a thread about Spamnasty (also excellent).
- QAPereo 9y agoThis sounds like something you could reasonably crowdfund, while delivering a really useful product.
- masswerk 9y agoMaybe, rather than investing more into Lenny, create some more personas (voice, gender, etc) to add to the variety between calls? Maybe also have an option to hand a call over to the next persona in lengthy calls (so that the caller has to start all over again, in order to explain the issue to the "room mate", "brother", "cousin", etc)...
- tzakrajs 9y agoThis is brilliant.
- masswerk 9y ago"Oh, yes ... Oh, so late ... so late, already ... Listen, you have been so friendly with me, but I really have to feed the ducklings. It's well ... beyond their hour ... May I hand you over to my wife, Gertrude? She is such a nice person and knows these things better than me ..."
- topspin 9y agoSomehow, somewhere Lenny has gotten connected to Lenny, detecting mutual silences and muttering at each other for years.
- psandersen 9y agoI'd love to see it as an app with a blacklist for spam numbers or telemarketers. Use a better text generation engine like a modern deep learning based generative model, and deep voice or crowd-sourced recordings.
- craigsmansion 9y ago> It wouldn't be difficult to produce dozens or hundreds of Lennies on quite a small budget. I'm not sure. Even though it is, as you say, remarkably unsophisticated on a technical level, it is extremely accomplished on a artistic level. When I first learned about Lenny, I listened to most of his conversations, and it's impressive to hear how often he actually seems to be answering questions or gets distracted in just the right way at just the right time. The writing (and acting) is just about perfect. I don't know if this is because of sheer genius, or simply lightning in a bottle, but either way I doubt it could be simply reproduced hundreds of times.
- esaym 9y agoThe ducks/geese had me rolling! Love it!