Automated pareidolia (or whatever the audio equivalent is)

What happens when a fax machine calls a voice-to-text converter? Well, the converter will do its thing, and attempt to generate text from what is effectively just a random jumble of noises, yielding this.

That alone is, while funny, not terribly remarkable, but it struck me as a perfect analogy for how people, when exposed to a random noise, especially if suitably magnified, will begin hearing voices uttering apparently meaningful sentences—this of course being the source of so-called elecronic voice phenomena (EVP, if you want to run with the in-crowd). Like the text to voice machine, it’s just our brain trying to do its thing: find patterns in data and interpret them.

I don’d know, I just thought it’s kinda neat having such a clear-cut example of this mechanism at hand; there’s no real wiggle room for making this into anything paranormal (unless you believe in possessed fax machines, perhaps).

Next, feed it through text-to-speech software and send it to a fax machine.

Reminds me of the time two chatbots had a conversation.

HEY, LISTEN!