Practical Speaker Recognition in Voice-to-Text applications

The following text/code will extend the initial dive into transcribing entire podcasts by adding semi-automated speaker recognition and the vosk api. I’ll be using episode 332 from the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast to do so, as it features 4 distinct speaker in clear studio environment — but is yet to be applied later on some more noisy and chaotic live shows.

No Such Thing As A Fish podcast

Adding speaker detection

The initial code of setting up the audio files with correct formatting is pretty much identical to the first part (for details see here), however the are two lines added to import another model pipeline with the speaker model which must be downloaded separately from here:

from vosk import Model, KaldiRecognizer, SpkModel
from pydub import AudioSegment
import io
import wave
import json
import numpy as np
import os

out_text_fol = 'path_to_project/transcripts/'
mp3_fol = 'path_to_project/Harmontown_Podcast_2012_2021/'
vosk_model_fp = 'path_to_models/vosk-model-en-us-0.42-gigaspeech'
AudioSegment.converter = 'path_to_ffmpeg_folder/bin/ffmpeg.exe'

model = Model(vosk_model_fp)
spk_model = SpkModel('path_to_models//vosk-model-spk-0.4')

# use a shuffled list when running several processes in parallel 
mp3_shuffled_list = os.listdir(mp3_fol)
random.shuffle(mp3_shuffled_list)
for mp3_fp in mp3_shuffled_list:
    
    # skip non mp3
    if  mp3_fp[-3:].lower() != "mp3" :
        continue
    
    # skip existing ones
    if mp3_fp[:-4] in [i[:-4] for i in os.listdir(out_text_fol)]:
        continue
    
    # read the mp3 file
    mp3_file = AudioSegment.from_mp3(mp3_fol + mp3_fp)
    
    # convert to mono wave file in memory
    memfile = io.BytesIO()
    mp3_file.export(memfile, 'wav')
    wav_file=AudioSegment.from_wav(memfile)
    wav_file_1c = wav_file.set_channels(1)
    wav_file_1c = wav_file_1c.set_frame_rate(16000)
    
    # pass wav-file to wave package
    memfile = io.BytesIO()
    wav_file_1c.export(memfile, 'wav')
    wf = wave.open(memfile, "rb")
    
    
    # build the model and recognizer objects.
    #model = Model(vosk_model_fp)
    rec = KaldiRecognizer(model, wf.getframerate())
    rec.SetWords(True)
    
    # add the speaker recognition model
    rec.SetSpkModel(spk_model)

Now the next part needs some adaption, as before all we cared about was the text only. However now we want to store the text and retain the speaker information, so for now we carry the speaker vector with us:

# initialize a list to hold dicts of results
dict_res_list = []

while True:
    data = wf.readframes(4000)
    if len(data) == 0:
        break
    if rec.AcceptWaveform(data):
        recResult = rec.Result()
        # convert the recognizerResult string into a dictionary  
        resultDict = json.loads(recResult)
        # save the 'text' value from the dictionary into a list
        dict_res_list.append( resultDict.fromkeys(['spk','text'], None) )   

# process "final" result
resultDict = json.loads(rec.FinalResult())
dict_res_list.append( resultDict.fromkeys(['spk','text'], None) )  

Now dict_res_list is a list of dictionaries, each containing some spoken text and the spk part containing a 128-dimensional vector representing the voice characteristics.

After the first run there should be slightly different speaker vectors for each transcribed sentence. How speaker recognition later works is, each of these vectors is compared to a reference vector. Each speaker will have their own reference vector. Or even multiple. To determine the closeness between two vectors a simple cosine similarity method can be applied. However for this to work, we need to create the reference vectors first.

Creating reference vectors per speaker

The simplest method would be to just jump into any sentence that is easily identifiable, grab the vector and assign it the name of the speaker. But that could turn out to be a really bad representation of the speaker for later comparisons.

Instead let’s first group all those vectors of the one episode into 4 groups. Each group should in the end hold all vectors that belong to exactly one person. To do this, we can use a simple k-means clustering approach. This will assign each 128-d vector to one of four clusters, and also create cluster centers in the process. These cluster centers are also 128-d vectors and can be seen as the “average” 128-d vector for that person. We will then use those vectors in the future:

def get_central_vectors(v_list):
   from sklearn.cluster import KMeans
   kmeans = KMeans(init="random",
                    n_clusters=4,
                    n_init=10,
                    max_iter=300)
   
   # remove all 0-length vectors
   filtered_list = [i for i in v_list if len(i)==128]
   kmeans.fit( np.array(filtered_list ) )
   
   # create central clusters and write them into a dictionary, keys are upcounting numbers
   central_vectors = kmeans.cluster_centers_
   central_vectors_dict = {str(i):central_vectors[i] for i in range(len(central_vectors))}
   
   # convert arrays back to lists
   for i in central_vectors_dict:
       central_vectors_dict[i] = list(central_vectors_dict[i])

   return central_vectors_dict

# create central vectors once, in the future simply load from json
central_vecs_fp = 'path_to_project/central_vecs.json'
if os.path.isfile(central_vecs_fp):
    with open(central_vecs_fp, "r", encoding="utf8") as r:
        central_vecs_dict = json.load(r)
else:
    central_vecs_dict = group_vectors(vector_list)
    with open(central_vecs_fp, "w", encoding="utf8") as w:
        json.dump(central_vecs_dict,w)

Now we run it once against the original dict_res_list and assign each of the text elements one of the speakers (still without a proper name). The most similar is to the central vectors is then selected. Similarity is calculated as cosine similarity: the closer the result is to 1 the more similar two vectors are:

# use cosine similarity to determine who similar two vectors are
def cosine_dist(vector1, vector2):
    dot = np.dot(vector1, vector2)
    norm_vec1 = np.linalg.norm(vector1)
    norm_vec2 = np.linalg.norm(vector2)
    cosine_similarity = dot / (norm_vec1 * norm_vec2)
    return cosine_similarity

def get_most_similar_speaker(input_vec, input_cv_dict):
    most_similar_person = None
    most_similar_score = 0
    
    # return immeadiatly if input vector was empty (too short text snippet for identification)
    if len(input_vec) == 0:
        return "Unknown"
    
    # comare all combination and save most closest one to return below
    for person in input_cv_dict:
        smlr = cosine_dist(input_vec, input_cv_dict[person])
        if smlr > most_similar_score:
            most_similar_score = smlr
            most_similar_person = person
    
    # return person only if a certain threshold was past. 
    #Otherwise return dummy name
    if most_similar_score > 0.5:
        return most_similar_person
    else:
        return "Unkown"   

central_vecs_fp = 'path_to_project/central_vecs.json'
if os.path.isfile(central_vecs_fp):
    with open(central_vecs_fp, "r", encoding="utf8") as r:
        central_vecs_dict = json.load(r)
else:
    central_vecs_dict = get_central_vectors(vector_list)
    with open(central_vecs_fp, "w", encoding="utf8") as w:
        json.dump(central_vecs_dict,w)

output_txt = ""
for text_entry in dict_res_list:
    speaker = get_most_similar_speaker(text_entry['spk'], central_vecs_dict)
    text_entry["spaker_name"] = speaker
    
    output_txt += f"\n[{speaker}]: " + text_entry['text'] + "\n"

# write text portion of results to a file
with open(out_text_fol + f"{mp3_fp[:-4]}.txt", 'w', encoding="utf8") as w:
    w.write(output_txt )

The final Output

Running the code above once will return an output file that allows to identfiy which speaker could be which. Then its only a matter of changing the placeholder values in the central_vecs.json to the correct names.

And that’s it. Run it again with the correct names and it should show up correctly. Run it against any other episode and it should work as well. As the hosts can change and guests might be on the show instead, those will probably show up as unknown. However, with the process above, once could easily find out the speaker vectors for guests, especially if they are recurring.

It might also be beneficial, to store more than one representative vector per person. Maybe get some samples from live shows. Then adapt the code above to handle several vectors in the central_vecs.json.

Accuracy and thoughts

Below you can find the transcript with speaker labels for ep. 322 “No Such Thing As An Innocent Apple”. If you read along while listening there are two things to notice:

1. Intro music or music in general will throw off the accuracy. To a point where Dan is classified as unknown in the intro, even though he can be clearly understood for most of the time
2. The sentences predict the speaker relatively well. However, they can contain mixed speakers, with several second long inputs from others, which still gets classified as the main speaker. So the model in its current setup is not good at cutting to a new sentence once a new speaker comes on. If that is part of my model setup I have not found out so far. There aren’t many inputs to tweak that I have found, but for now it is as good as it gets

[James]: hi everyone james here now before we start this week’s show i just wanna tell you one little thing about it and that is that it was actually recorded quite a long time ago all the way back in february in fact and the reason i want to tell you that is because first of all it’s obviously in the office and we’re all still in

[James]: our homes at the moment and also because there’ll be a few things that we might say in there that might really perhaps give away that we didn’t record it this week for instance i do talk about jasper carrot for a while and that probably would have been a dated reference anytime that we said it in the last five years but hey when you listen

[James]: you’ll get the idea so enjoy the show and just marvel about how young we all sounded back in february okay i’m with the podcast

[Unknown]: oh that hurt

[Unkown]: ah hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast coming to you from the qr officers and covent garden my name is dan schreiber i’m sitting here

[Dan]: with james harkin andrew hunter murray an amateur shinskie and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you anna my fact this week is that in the eighteenth century women express their political beliefs by wearing decorative stick

[James]: acres on their faces was cool what kind of stickers did they say like vote labour or ah yeah screw you boris just wow very little their four hundred prescient women have amazing foresight and foreheads

[Unknown]: sticker

[Anna]: um no this was so facial stickers were in this huge fashion for bow sort of two hundred years and about the turn of the eighteenth century they suddenly became political and so there was one commentator for instance who said that he went to the opera and he saw two parties a very fine women as you said arranged in battle formation against each

[Anna]: other and he said one group was wearing patches and stickers on the left side of their foreheads and the other on the right became apparent they were weak supporters and tory supporters and i looked into this and this was a thing so it wasn’t the stickers were just like little light beauty spots or something but it was where you bought them that was important is that ah yes

[Anna]: that seems to be ah yes so they started off as for decoration but it got to the extent that there were some marriage contracts where women would insist before they married their husband that regardless of the husband’s political opinions the wife should be able to patch as she pleased oh wow

[James]: and it’s so you’d have one or two things but did it get to the point where people you know when you see full face tattoos did you ever see people just complete louis c not completely the full face but you might see lots of these like fake beauty spots and you could supposedly identify prostitutes because their faces had so many of these patches on the was that a sign of being sexy

[James]: see though having lots of stickers well having one sticker was supposed to be and the reason is um supposedly venus the goddess of beauty she had one mole on her face and it was by that one imperfection that you could see how beautiful the rest of her face was and the idea was that they were kind of copying that and by having like one little

[James]: beauty spot it would show the paleness of your skin perhaps or you know show off the rest of your skin so if you have lots and lots of tickers that means you already really beautiful because you’ve gotten you need so many imperfections to disguise how fit you are could be

[James]: you wouldn’t believe what i look like without these stickers really nice it could have been that you’re covering the symptoms of stds ah it’s a real gamble

[Andy]: so were these sorry what i didn’t write didn’t think that we had um glue sticker technology in the winner’s eighteenth century we handy lou sure okay what would they kind of fuzzy felt stickers that kind of thing i actually don’t think we had fuzzy felt

[Anna]: it would be made of various things so they could be made of silk or taffeta or leather sometimes and then they have um mouse for apparently malfa enough like when you talk on your tongue ah no if i suddenly developed a list of six sounded like mouse from where i was set but okay mauser okay i heard mouth as well

[Anna]: huh okay right in and totally yeah um so and then they tap on the back often surface that you could lick so women tended to take out the handbags and lick them to attach them to their face so you get very thin paper that does that or they had adhesive so they just stick it on with some glue yeah but sometimes the piece of wasn’t so great so there was an article in the spectator that’s

[James]: spoke about a woman who had a beauty spot on her forehead but by the end of the evening had gone to her chair yeah

[Anna]: they got more more elaborate as well didn’t they is it caught on so i think it started in france and the french called them mush witches for flies cause they look like little flies landing on your face um but yeah they expanded to be weird shapes so by the end of the eighteenth century you’d have been cut into stars

[Dan]: or sort of moons or crown shapes or any shape you wanted really you still get those don’t you on small children yeah yeah i’m not adults who like a bit of fun yeah why are you wearing that weird copy dog on before i was so considering doing it the slightly bolder i’ve ever go right yeah now you do get the low carb little kite

[Andy]: out of um add enough stars and yeah i’ve been very brave at the dentist today

[Andy]: yeah stick outside your flat out did i know actually i’ve got what i used to have one of those but it’s a safety pin one so that’s not for the forehead nose for the clothes safety pinned really it was a badge i’m describing a badge yeah what’s interesting about that is i think you’re only brave at the dentist wants so you don’t need it to be bad you only need it to be

[Dan]: sticker do you know what you’re right i’m confusing it with my i’ve been to a party at pizza hut badge which is a badge because that’s the thing that lasts your life if you go to a party a pizza hut should be early nineties yeah you want to show off about you that’s why you were budgets you don’t want to be worried budget says i’d be brave at the dentist just to show up you feel pretty silly at the military per

[Dan]: parade will be able to

[Dan]: just being brave at the dentist

[Dan]: i got this one for bravery

[Dan]: i’ve thought there’s some drawings that people have done some of the designs and there was a horse and carriage one and i think that’s been our stride but that was satire was it that was someone taking yeah taking the job so ashamed of those real yeah i was really hoping that that would be because i just thought how interesting heads must have been back then

[Dan]: just wow i don’t know what you just won’t know if you’re sitting on the tube and someone sat across from me with a horse and carriage drawn on their head and they had other cartoons you know we need the paper just like risa do people still have tattoos these days so you just wet yourself the tube just read people’s tattoos like do but they give me a look that says i’m not a friendly

[Andy]: oh well this is the thing about um other kinds of stickers is that they could be indicators of how friendly or not someone is xo bumper stickers if people have a bumper stickers on their car they tend to be more aggressive and territorial drivers yeah yeah expense study in two thousand and eight by colorado state university and they say

[Andy]: evade people saying do you have some sticks on your car and do you drive like a bastard and basically people who said yes to one said yes to the other they said yeah i drive more territorially more aggressively i do not respond constructively on the road when people get in my way and how often are these the baby on board stickers i don’t think that’s earth well i read the article and actually it says

[James]: it doesn’t matter what’s on the sticker right so you might have a sticker that says everyone needs to be kind to each other and you’re still going to drive like a maniac yeah so baby on board as well yeah yeah likely to be aggressive just one more thing on an alternative use for stickers ah for yourself decoration is to cover blemishes and so i think that’s that’s

[Anna]: sort of where facial stickers might have come from originally but men wore them quite a lot to cover blemishes or to accentuate them and so ah so if men had been to war for instance it became quite common for them to come back and they’d put a scar sticker over their scar i think if a scar started to fade or something then you big black scar there and so there’s francisco and all

[Anna]: well that ends well which now makes sense if you know where bertram comes back from war and it says he’s got a patch of velvet on his face and it’s unclear if there’s a scar underneath and it was sort of a thing that people did if they hadn’t really seen much military action and they a bit of a coward and they’d run away at the first sign anyway is that they’ve suddenly put a big blemish on their face to imply that they’d been shot in the head

[James]: wow yes amazing i’ve got little scar on my face maybe i’ll try accentuate it i’ve used this with some mouse fur

[Andy]: one of the sites i’m not sure which side that’s right yeah somebody got shot in the civil wars because yeah i’m obscene bumper stickers can sometimes be a matter for the law okay so there are all these lawsuits that happen in the usa over whether you’re allowed about a particular bumper sticker or not or whether it’s basically creating a public disturbance

[Andy]: just by having it on your car so in two thousand and eight a guy ah went to the georgia supreme court because he had a shit happens bumper sticker okay and he won then more recently this bit is very rude by the way but the police in florida arrested and charged a man who had a bumper sticker which said i eat ass

[Andy]: and that it was really big it’s right in the middle of his back windscreen as well so there’s no way if you’re driving along you won’t see it and will be referring to donkey meat do we know

[Unknown]: oh

[Dan]: that wasn’t his defense actually

[Andy]: actually it should be but the police pulled him over and they said can you remember it so it wasn’t offensive and he said well how do you just do that basic can you remove the second s from ass so it will be eight as but then the grammar police come

[Anna]: um guys here’s the grandfather the god of stickers who got a stick at the god of stickers you almost a full album serine yeah oh no i was thinking of mr avery over yo a stanton

[Unkown]: his sorry

[Anna]: well it’s because you never do any of the office admin andy you are not familiar with avery stickers but those of us who post letters every once in a while and this is like more rightly feel like this whole fact has been building up to it

[Anna]: um no stanton avery mate was the inventor of the self-adhesive sticker as then you didn’t need to lick it you didn’t need to add glue to it and he still dominates the label market today so he was looking into this

[Anna]: he um said that he built his first sticker machine i love this by marrying together a motive my washing machine and a sewing machine sewing machine parts wow so he smashed them together and generated a shed load of stickers his company was initially called come clean products spelling come k u m which i think is a good thing

[Anna]: was changed ah how did we make his glue

[Anna]: he was actually very cagey about the process he was pretty tired

[Anna]: super poor and so he really liked dragged himself up from the bottom he lived in a rented chicken coop while wrenches he couldn’t even afford

[Dan]: chicken coop

[Dan]: pay the chickens yeah

[Anna]: i don’t know if the chickens own the coop i think they were also renting oh wow

[Dan]: comparable flatmates yeah eggs every morning that’s true yeah do you want to eat a bag if your flatmate has just laid it before you horrified guys

[Anna]: i used to eat food that’s come out of any of my friends awesome

[Dan]: delicious way to check it that’s amazing yes so cool he could have written i eat and then in brackets eggs that have come out of chickens close brackets us

[Anna]: another strong defense going up

[Dan]: um so he tried to hundred business god how did he get a washing machine and the chicken coop ah so i think this is post chicken coop and got it because he married a slightly wealthier lady who lent him a bit of money wow and tea so i need is a washing machine go back to your place online

[Dan]: chickens out tonight

[Dan]: yeah so anyway invite them to the hindu

[Unkown]: you got laid that night

[Dan]: okay it is time for fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that the very first print run of the adventures of huckleberry finn had to be pulped after a bookstore owner discovered someone had sneaked a drawing of a penis into one of the illustrations the first suspect has to be the illustrator

[Dan]: the issue yes we genuinely don’t know we don’t know if it was the illustrator we don’t know if it was the photo engraver at the actual factory where they were printing the book what we do know is when these books came out at the end of chapter thirty two huck finn is meeting his aunt sally and uncle silas and uncle silas has a bigger wreck

[Dan]: penis drawn in in the illustration itself and as a result thirty thousand copies had to be wild and did they tend to be checks they checked the plot and they don’t it’s not part of the storyline that references uncle silas is erect weirdly weirdly i read the book and i can confirm there isn’t a bit where

[Andy]: my uncle silas has an erection is showing it off to his families to be very disappointing when you got to the end of that is the only reason i’m okay

[Dan]: so this is obviously it’s a very important book in american literature ernest hemingway said all modern american literature comes from one book and is called huckleberry finn and the idea was it was the first book that used the vernacular of americans at that point americans were really writing in the tone of british and european authors are not huge

[Dan]: using the day-to-day language and he kind of set the tone um unfortunately it’s also um a book that’s laced with racism and that’s caused huge problems basically since publication it’s it’s not a book that’s sort of not been controversial throughout the years the language uses difficult racism we should say that it said mark twain wrote it in the eighties but it sets about forty

[Anna]: earlier in the eighteen forties is an edge yeah and the main plot within for anyone who hasn’t read it is basically it’s about hoffman who is this kind of poor kid who held twelve or thirteen oh and he runs away along with a runaway slave who is called jim and they run away together and they are good friends and jim is a very sympathetic character

[Anna]: yeah but at the same time very problematically drawn yeah one of the not drawn with an erect penis like uncle silas we should say

[Anna]: people have objected to stuff other than that so it was extremely controversial as soon as it was published largely because of the kind of crudeness of some of the language and it was written in this native dialect it wasn’t just old american dialectics proper mississippi eighteen forties dialects and it was banned for bad grammar and employment of inelegant ics

[Anna]: impressions things like ninety five of brooklyn library banned it because huck not only itched but he scratched so apparently that’s disgusting and he said sweat when he should have said perspiration so mark twain had been kind of unhappy with the way the publishing had been going and he decided he didn’t want to have normal publishers like before

[James]: and get the money that way he wanted to have a subscription service so he sent people door to door with like um you know the first chapter and said look does this new book now how do you fancy buying it and then we’ll send you all the chapters in future and he basically because he did this it meant he could have full control of it which meant he has full control of all of the

[James]: illustrations and it meant that when the illustrators kept sending himself he was like don’t like that don’t like that don’t like that don’t like that do like that but love that penis yeah well it’s so is that maybe wise they practical theory that the illustrator hated him so much because he kept asking them to change things that you like right fun but they offered a massive

[Andy]: reward to the pressman working on the novel and the five hundred dollars award which would have been a lot of money today and no one fessed up so we still there’s no culprit and as the investigation still open

[Anna]: i think the office the reward is still available he had a terrible relationship with his sort of type setters and proofreaders and everyone like that didn’t need which might be why they were so pissed off with him he hated them and it does sound like they kept on trying to improve his punctuation and grammar which was deliberately vernacular and once upon getting a text back and seeing the corrections that have been made he

[Anna]: i wrote to a friend i’ve telegraphed orders to have the proofreaders shot without giving him time to pray so it was tense i think you know if someone wrote that about how much your penis on their picture

[Andy]: it wasn’t the most successful book that he published with that firm so the first two books the firm published were huckleberry finn and the memoirs of ulysses s grant ex president and it was pretty much the last thing grant did was write this book and it was so successful that he gave grant’s widow the biggest ever royalty check

[Andy]: in american publishing history like it was absolutely massive and it was thanks to that daughter dor technique that james mentioned because it was war veterans so civil war veterans going door to door selling the book and that’s a pretty strong sell you know i might be wrong in saying this but i’ve from the story that i know about that it’s that when ulysses s grant died his wife

[Dan]: i was really struggling financially and was not given any help from anyone and mark twain published the book and gave her that high amount of royalties um before he knew what was gonna be successful so that she had money to live off for the rest of her life um apparently it’s an extraordinary book that autobiography early yeah yeah

[Dan]: yeah i’ve read so many things about it being the best book by anyone in government ever as a solid it’s just incredible apparently surely not better than the art of the deal sure

[James]: ah surely not better than jacob rees bugs book about the victorians

[Anna]: i’ll be looking into that now if we wanna talk about offensive line

[Dan]: mark twain was wrote the first book on a typewriter in america there’s a bit of dispute over whether it was tom sawyer another one of his books um it’s usually credited as tom sawyer um but he used to love writing on a typewriter and no one really had it at the time so people used to write him letters and he would write letters back on his typewriter they would then

[Dan]: right back to him asking about the typewriter and that got so annoying with so many people running back to him asking him holy moly what is this this is incredible that he stopped writing letters using his typewriter got inundated yeah i really love his correspondence because he didn’t really much like getting them a lot of the time that he i read one that he got nineteen no one

[James]: and the letter said dear mr mark twain i am a little girl six years old i have read your stories ever since they first came out i have a cat named kitty and a dog named pup i like to guess puzzles did you write a story for the herald competition i hope you will answer my letter yours truly augusta contract to which he replied well no he

[James]: didn’t reply he just wrote a comment on it saying labor temps of a middle-aged liar to pull an autograph

[James]: ah invented one game for kids which i think sounds pretty cool so he he measured out a eight hundred and seventeen foot path of his driveway and he marked every single foot and that was supposed to be a year and it was the year from ten sixty six

[James]: when william the conqueror arrived in britain and the idea as you would walk along the path and each point when there was a new king or queen in england or britain then you would put a stake in the ground and you would be like oh this is what the first this is henry the second blah blah blah and it was a way of having fun but also learning your king

[James]: and those days education was very much rote learning like you just had to learn all these things and this was a fun way of doing it or a very annoyingly slow way of getting to the front door after a long day this

[Anna]: but he turned it into a book i didn’t know who tried to it sounds really complicated i didn’t fully understand even as to yeah sounded quite sounded a bit like battleship so basically it was another sort of history date memorization game and essentially you’d have a shot with a series of dates on it and each player would say a date so you say um

[Anna]: nineteen eighteen and then the other playhouses an event that happened on that date say the end of the first world war the i cleverly chose my box so it has something to say friends i mean you also chose a date that was nearly ten years off and no one could possibly guess what was going to happen

[Anna]: but then a plan puts a pin in that day if they get it right and if if they don’t get around to get a pin and i guess covered up all your dates you want that’s quite fun yeah for a nerd

[Dan]: ah okay it is time for fact number three and that is andy my fact is that before vaccination was invented the main method of inoculation against smallpox was to powder scabs and blow them up your nose

[Andy]: lonely or to get someone else to blow them up your nose that’s why i’d say yes very hard to blow up your own nose and this was how innoculation worked for a long time it was done in china thousand years ago this was the method they knew about this and we didn’t ah it it works reasonably well so if you were healthy ah you

[Andy]: i would get some smallpox scabs and you would leave them for a little while because fresh scabs were likely to give you the infection properly so they would be dried aged smallpox scabs and they would be pounded up and then they will be blown up your nose with a special silver blowpipe for

[Andy]: the procedure as well as the chinese doctors had special blowpipes to do this and then um apparently the right nostrils was used for boys and the left for girls and you would maybe get some mild symptoms and some people did actually just get full blown smallpox but most people then got it you know some mild symptoms and then when resistant to any following

[Andy]: exposure is a low percentage wasn’t it yeah yeah um so this was a really decent way of doing it before we had the method of vaccination and we didn’t know about this is that right the eighteenth said it took about a seven hundred years to get over

[James]: is worked by the same method as vaccination right which is that it’s an attenuated or weakened version of the disease yeah and in a scab and your body then make sunny bodies that can fight against that then it can fight against the main thing so yeah i think there was another version where you had some powdered scab as well or you had some pus from a smallpox pustule

[Andy]: and you would make a little scratch on your skin and then you would just pull that pus or you know just rob the powdered scab into your skin that work too and that’s called vario relation because very little was the latin for smallpox um in two thousand and eleven the virginia historical society enrichment um had some things from it’s collection

[James]: ah and one of them was a letter from the eighteen seventies that had a smallpox scab in it and the idea was that the person who wrote the letter in the nineteenth century was sending it to his father it had been taken from the arm of a child and his father was going to make it into dust and inoculate people yeah um but then

[James]: it never got to the recipient and so they just found this letter and of course immediately the census for disease control came in the hazmat suits like said holy shit we felt needs to be having this that the public can see this because smallpox has been eradicated basically has it and um so yeah in the unsafe that was

[James]: some of the virus on this sub still but it wasn’t deadly enough i mean it must have attenuated pretty hard yeah exactly one hundred hell when was it it was from eighteen seventy six and they found that in twenty eleven wow that it’s really spooky finding it not knowing what it is yeah you just think you found a little button or something and maybe it’s like a little sticker to follow

[Andy]: thanks yeah but all these doctors are there are different methods of doing variation and there were some celebrity doctors in britain in the seventeenth eighteenth century who worked work this out so have you heard of johnny notions of johnny notion sounds like it got some weird ideas

[Andy]: well he was a scottish doctor and he had a really successful method for various dating because he would he would collect the pass first of all yeah and everyone has their own method of making it a bit less deadly basically so he would dry it with peat smoke so you had a lovely sort of smoky flavor from

[Andy]: then he would bury it in the ground between sheets of glass okay with some kaempferol um then he would keep it there for seven or eight years this is likely to make it a whisky isn’t it really yeah genuine years and then he would insert it and he would then put a cabbage leaf on top as a plaster and this was apparently a really good way of doing

[Andy]: yeah and they just gave you the nice amount i suppose it does take the edge off the pus doesn’t it

[Dan]: most pp cabbage flavor to the apparently you were more likely to get a job if you could be seen to have smallpox scars because then the suggestion was oh great you can work with us you’re not going to pass it on you’ve had it already yeah that was seen as a sort of arc right and a safe workmate so two two of the earliest

[James]: people who worked with inoculation were robert cock in germany and louis pasteur in france ah and they fell out with each other because um pastor once was doing a talk and he used the phrase require aliment which means a collection of german writer

[James]: being but the translator translated it as all gooey allemand which means german arrogance and so um cut it never forgave him for that because he thought that pastel was calling american although i think that before that they loathe each other if you read the dialogues that they had the letters they wrote each other it’s just

[Anna]: basically spitting with rage you know a cop writing letters to pastor accusing him of stealing all of his ideas and vice versa saying you’re a fraud you know really foul language because there was this huge fight basically when we suddenly discovered the power of the idea of vaccination between a few scientists wasn’t there

[James]: it was that was after jenna yes i want jenna okay so i’d put cheddar is the person who um kind of we give the we say creative vaccination yes today right he um got it from milkweeds did he yeah because they were milkmaid near him and he noticed that they got a thing called cow pot

[Andy]: ox which is a disease that cows got and they would only get one single pustule on their hands which is where they’ve been touching the cows because of all the milking and he theorized maybe this is a mild version of smallpox so then he did this amazing gamble jenner he took some pass from a milkmaid and he injected it into a child

[Dan]: yeah and six yeah not his child by the way although he did also do it with his own child actually later on so fairplay and i think when he knew it worked yeah and then he six weeks later he injected the child with full blown smallpox um and he didn’t know how it works and um yeah and then but later in life they became friends so

[Andy]: in the jail yeah james phipps he was the son of edward jenner’s gardener which if it hadn’t worked would’ve made the gardening very very awkward i think for a long time i think he would have ruined your rosebush

[James]: he had smallpox when he was a child jenna and one of the reasons that he kind of went into getting rid of it later is because he had such a bad time of it he was very elated so they gave him some of the posts awesome mosque scabs or something but he was prepared for that by being starved purged

[James]: and bled and locked in a stable with other infected boys and will never venture boys yeah so they kind of very related all these people gave them like very mild symptoms and then put them all in a stable wow meanwhile stanton ovaries outside of checking don’t know you’re born gay

[Dan]: ah okay it’s time for our final factor the show and that is james okay my fact this week is that you can tell if a movie character is a goodie or a buddy by the kind of phone they use

[James]: that’s that’s sucks now that i know that and i’m watching movies i know sorry this is not just a spoiler of one movie spoiler of old movies so this came up in my ss feed and thanks to the blog nice aroma which i follow and it was an interview with rian johnson who is the director of the film knives out and he said that

[James]: apple have forbid filmmakers from letting villains use their iphones on the screen and so if one of your characters is using an apple products then they must be a good guy oh thanks so you can’t tell who’s the good guy in the good the bad the ugly for instance it’s a wonderful life i’ve already had mobile phones

[Andy]: i’ve been edited in this yeah yeah sometimes it’s not clear who is a goodie and who’s a baddie if someone is if someone pushes one person in front of a train to say five people who will be allowed my phone says you’re absolutely right in any decent story everyone has a mixture of good and bad one has one i find one android yeah

[Dan]: so that’s a good point actually that saves it for me because the movie might have been sponsored by samsung for example yeah yeah yeah so that’s good okay great so i’ll stop googling which phone sponsored all my movies

[James]: and but yeah and there was also an article in the verge that says that apple says that it’s products should only be used in the best light that reflects favorably on apple products and they don’t they according to apple they don’t pay to have the phones in movies but what they do do is give lots of free phones notebooks and stuff too

[Andy]: and the movies are in return for them being nice but they wouldn’t show someone looking up on the internet how to kill orphans on a on a mac but on a map but you can do that notebook know yeah were to inject this person’s

[Andy]: um but this is a thing called product displacement which is the cure is kind of like product displays a progress places where you replace a real brown with a fictional one because the original brand of really annoyed about oh yeah so um there’s a film called flight which stars denzel washington as an alcoholic pilot who see i’ve seen that

[Andy]: he manages to pull off a crazy movie the plane’s about to crash due to you know it’s it’s all gone wrong on the plane and he manages to fly it in upside down and then land it the right way up at the very last moment i’ve got to say the first five minutes of that movie is one of the best things i’ve ever seen it’s so tense so amaze okay and the rest is terrible

[Dan]: if you want to say it out loud i’ve seen it too it’s shit damn thinks the film is bad

[Anna]: it doesn’t need to watch it especially now the ending has been spoiled anyway will the rest of the silvers like other just lengthy legal process about whether he was right to save to play eagle yeah imagine if you go to watch that film and you’re five minutes late

[Dan]: yeah but for the worst thing on

[Dan]: oh my god they should make into a short and release it sure does yeah yeah it’s anyway it’s probably the makers who gave us back to the future he is an alcoholic pilot denzel washington

[Andy]: the character sorry not robinson mk has not denzel water to the character but he drinks budweiser and a vodka that budweiser own either while he’s flying the plane or shortly before you guys have seen the film so you’ll know but subways were furious about this and they said can you not show this drunk pilot sinking a bud before he fled the plane and they refused

[Dan]: they said there’s nothing you can do but it’s so um that happens sometimes movies do have to buckle to these bigger companies so slumdog millionaire when danny boyle made that he gave an interview where he talks about the fact that he had some criminal gangs drinking coca-cola at one point and ice-cold coca-cola and i do not say yeah a week sorry

[Dan]: a youth personally sponsored by coca-cola today wow was it it was a refreshing ice cold coca-cola so yummy um available in all shops but yeah the drinking of that and coca-cola took a sort of stand against it and so they had to paint it out in the post-production note yeah slumdog millionaire was the most bizarre

[Anna]: csa so i haven’t realised this but obviously at the time it was so huge and won the oscar didn’t it yeah and was massive i hadn’t realised it was made by the same company that makes you want to be a millionaire so it was one huge piece of product placement oh yeah isn’t that just a carer who makes that case i did so yeah well he wrote slumdog millionaire

[James]: it might be called co-leader yes yeah he’s pretty hands off with it but yeah he’s he’s a diary beneficiary of both those things think it’s celadon isn’t it it’s on the door yeah it’s well it’s a company called cellar door of course it’s like salvador just got it i don’t think that doesn’t know deliberately named to be like the salvador it might be it’s jasper kara he does lovers i think punks yeah metaphor

[James]: behind don’t look behind the cellar door it’s actually just the sarah too

[Anna]: any international listeners who wondering who just characters there’s no time yeah um so i still adore made this who made you wanna be a millionaire and then they decided to make slumdog to sort of ah advertise who wants to be millionaire and the screenwriter for slumdog millionaire was one of the co-creators of who wants to be millionaire but

[Anna]: the only thing that they stipulated was that at the end this is a spoiler where he’s being accused of cheating the hero is being accused of cheating the host of millionaire sort of tortures him backstage and that point they said we can’t have it looked like the show is torturing this boy because that’s going to make us look bad so it’s just gonna be the host so it was like chris torrence going out on a limb it was chris

[Unknown]: sharon

[Dan]: the international list to see what clinging on to jasper cara

[Unkown]: give it up but it’s terrible

[Dan]: i’m like wow wow i’ll talk to requip but does the host of who wants to be millionaire have access to backstage like you couldn’t do more than a quick chinese bird or a wedgie could ease that tension music yeah it’s got a soup along advert break without telugu

[Andy]: i found out just looking at product placement stuff i found out one of the first ever examples of product placement on a podcast okay so this was in two thousand and five there was a show called the dawn and drew show okay and it was the newspapers at the time had to explain what a podcast was which is the

[Andy]: so the report i read said podcasters or this particular podcast is a program filled with strong language that is available only in a digital format and downloaded on ipods and other devices that play m p three files okay so that’s what a podcast is and this one was the dawning true show and it was sponsored it was product placement ted by durex okay and directs

[Andy]: um had inserted their product into the show because it was hosted by a husband and wife and the show featured the husband and the wife and their dog hercules tasting flavored condoms that was the first overwatch place

[Dan]: okay the firms said they were delighted they said this is close exactly how we want to position the brand will they come to this for dogs and humans alike

[Dan]: i think because you’d have to have a dog meat flavors

[Anna]: oh then i love strawberry today

[Dan]: so anyway just like we’ve got further to think before we hit rock

[James]: you know your um this is not a better product placement but we’re recording this podcast on a mac computer and we’re all good guys and now if you were to close that don’t close it because we might lose the recording but you would see that the apple is upside down as you’re looking at it so maybe if you half close it sits

[James]: kind of upside down as you’re looking now the reason that is is for product placement reasons so it was in legally blonde which is a properly great film like yeah and she is using an apple mac but the apple is upside down to what we have it today because that’s the way it used to be because it makes much more sense if you have it closed and your

[James]: looking at it the apple is the right way up yeah um and that’s how it used to be but then there was an employee called joe marino who said to steve jobs look if we’re going to put these movies what we need is when it’s open and you’re looking at it the apple is the right way yeah so they changed it or if someone’s just like watching you in a cafe just course you gotta put the right way up for the people looking at it and yeah one who owns it already

[Andy]: that’s really interesting so basically the apple on your apple mac is not for you it’s everyone else yeah wow some advertisers um this is the the next step they’re doing for advertising and things so advertisers in soap operas are now selling billboards inside the fictional locations in the soap operas well yeah so coronation street

[Andy]: is a fictional street yet but it’s fictional street with advertising billboards on it yeah and you know jewelry shops and other shops are buying up advertising space as flat national coronation street yeah oh clever and there’s a new thing also the other advertisers are doing where you know you’ll be able to digitally alter what viewers see on screen when they’re streaming

[Andy]: so you’ll be able from people see different things it’s so so if you are watching let’s say you drink whiskey and your tv knows that you drink whiskey um there might be billboards for whiskey brands in the background whereas if you were if you’re a person who like secretly buys dog beet flavored condom yeah

[James]: ideal watching coronation street with your parents

[Unkown]: yeah

[Dan]: such a good point yeah whole family looking at each other suspicious

[Anna]: it’s like an agatha christie

[Dan]: yeah exactly wow well then would do based on the time of day even so if you’re wanting late at night there’ll be adverts for as we all do what coronation street lights lit up another late night set

[Andy]: yeah there’ll be updates for august late night stuff like swearing

[Andy]: whiskey okay when you’re watching in the morning dispute but as for cereal and orange juice or whiskey

[Anna]: just one ironic thing about this facts is that apples are a sign that someone’s a villain what in films fairly people escorted this if you’re the body you’re always eating an apple not always this isn’t profiles yes sir mr bald

[Anna]: the bad guys and doctor who do that though they cause an apple a day keeps the doctor away ah ah this is true please send in more if you’ve seen them but ah draco malfoy does it geoffrey rush empowers the caribbean it’s an crunches on an apple colin farrell when he’s being a vampire and suddenly or other and it’s it’s got a name is the eric

[Anna]: gueant apple sometimes it’s really just to show your dominance because it’s kind of showing you slow the loop yeah yeah i can eat an apple as well as talking to you i don’t give enough of a crap about what you’re saying to stop eating my apple i wonder if the slight the history of the poisoned apple in very tales and things sounds been theorized internet james you should check the internet

[Anna]: hour out more on that

[Dan]: garden of eden yeah again

[Dan]: apple was eaten there it’s all on the forum it sounds like we could think of everything on the internet and so

[Unknown]:

[Dan]: okay that’s it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you’d like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts i’m on at schreiber land james at james harkin andy at andrew hunter-reay edge jetski you can email podcast at q dot com

[Dan]: yup or you can go to our group account at no such thing or a website no such thing as a fish dot com why not check the internet out as well while you’re there and we’ll be back again next week with another episode we’ll see then goodbye

[Dan]: anyway i spoke to this week of the new directs range of pedigree chum stop the podcast

[Unkown]: ah

[Unknown]:

[Unknown]: