Comedy Central
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2015–2024
2:47 · 48M views · Oct 9, 2014
A Key & Peele sketch in which two friends keep misreading the tone of each other's text messages while making plans.
HN brings it up in threads about tone getting lost in text-based communication.
5 comments from Hacker News
This. It’s amazing most people have no clue that they are mapping their mood state onto their own interpretation of someone’s text messages. We evolved to read non-verbal communication. Key and Peele have a great skit on this: this video
> Actively processing voice on someone else's tempo over a crappy mic often leads to mistakes On the flipside, text-only conversation often simply doesn't include that nuance at all. I can't count the number of times I've completely misunderstood someone's tone over text when it would have been blindingly obvious over voice. Key and Peele even did a skit about it: this video Voice and text have different strengths and weaknesses as communications media. Both are appropriate in different situations. I will admit, however, to being somewhat "allergic" (as another commenter put it) to voice, probably to an unreasonable extent, because I selfishly value my ability to focus on what I'm doing right now instead of giving it to someone else for a couple of minutes. But at the same time, I've often found that someone older who didn't grow up with easy text-based communication will use a phone call when a text would have been more than sufficient, and this can be quite irritating at times. I suspect it's in reaction to this that younger people tend to avoid voice communication even when it would probably be a better choice.
I used this to check the text messages from Key and Peele's "Text Message Confusion" skit[1]: Keegan: "I've been trying to reach out to you all day, are we on for tonight?" Polite (71 / 100) Jordan: "Sorry dude, missed your texts. I assumed we'd meet at the bar. Whatever, I don't care." Polite (71 / 100) Keegan: "Do you even want to hang out?" Impolite (30 / 100) Jordan: "Like I said, whatever." Neutral (47 / 100) Keegan: "Jesus, you are fucking priceless" Impolite (30 / 100) Jordan: "You're the one who's fucking priceless!" Impolite (6 / 100) Keegan: "You wanna go right now?" Impolite (31 / 100) Jordan: "Ok let's go" Polite (76 / 100)[2] Keegan: "You wanna really do this now?" Impolite (13 / 100) Jordan: "Fuck yeah, let's do it" Impolite (19 / 100) Jordan: "First round's mine" Neutral (43 / 100) [1]: this video [2]: Adding a "." to the end of the "Ok let's go" drops it by three points to 73 / 100
Correctly interpreting online communication is difficult. What one person considers constructive feedback another person may interpret as negativity. Reminds me of that Key & Peele skit: this video
Obviously the AI needs to adjust the support person's voice to match the customer's, so the customer gets back what they give. Prior art from art: this video