Cool Audio Thing Of The Week: Robo Trump
Cool Audio Thing of the Week is a series where we highlight one quirky, compelling, whoa-I-didn’t-know-that-existed piece of audio that’s definitely worth listening to. This week, it’s the Robo Trump podcast.
It’s been a crazy year, and, LOL, it’s only February. In two months, we’ve already launched the most powerful rocket ever into space, sent a false missile alert to the residents of Hawaii (including me, who was there visiting family) warning them of impending doom, and welcomed a secret Kylie Jenner baby. I’ve become increasingly certain that we are just living in a computer simulation.
From this zeitgeist emerges Robo Trump, a podcast by ReadEar Ltd — a company that creates audio products for businesses. Robo Trump has a simple premise: a bot reads tweets from the public about President Trump in a very weird, very monotone voice. Picture the stilted drone of a robot answering commands in a bad ’80s movie, or, as one TuneIn employee describes it, “like [the robot] just kidnapped my kid.” But oddly enough, the more you listen, the more oddly soothing it gets.
Even after researching the podcast, I am unsure what makes something a Robo Trump-worthy tweet. (For more clarity on what the tweet-ers are actually trying to convey, they have a Twitter account with all the tweets featured on the podcast). Two of the tweets I heard included one from political editor Josh Kraushaar, read simply as “Number two thousand and twenty,” and another from national security reporter Spencer Ackerman, read as, “Here’s some stuff.”
The inability of the bot to decipher tone or sarcasm means that many of the nuances of tweets are lost, making the podcast just a stream-of-consciousness reading of Trump-focused words. Another kind of funny moment: the robot can’t say the word “hashtag,” so when someone uses a hashtag in a tweet, it either skips the word altogether completely or says “pound sign” instead.
At the time of publication, Robo Trump, lying at the intersection of accessibility, politics, and podcasts, had nearly 215,000 episodes, and Robo Trump’s Facebook page boasted nearly 2 million downloads in the last 90 days. With this many episodes — and the number of potential episodes and frequency of news episodes depending only on Twitter itself — the feed changes just as quickly as the news cycle.
-Meghan Crowther, News and Talk Editor
