With “Talk Obama To Me,” Users Put Words In The President’s Mouth

Channels like Baracksdubs have found success online with videos that splice together clips from President Obama’s speeches in order to make him “sing” the lyrics to popular songs. These “dub” videos have become so popular that even Jimmy Fallon has jumped on the bandwagon, and now, you can to. With a website called Talk Obama To Me, the President can be made to speak any sentence entered by a user.

Talk Obama To Me was designed by a linguistics grad student named Ed King, who created a database of Obama clips that match up with specific words. If a clip doesn’t exist to match a word entered by a user, then the word will be broken down by syllable, which doesn’t always come out sounding right but gives the project a greater range of phrases.

Talk Obama To Me doesn’t offer any editing tools, so no matter what phrase you input into it, you’ll never come out with a clip that sounds as smooth as a typical Baracksdubs video. Still, the project is fun to play around with, if you can get it to work; after receiving extensive media coverage over the past couple of days, Talk Obama To Me has experienced a lot of downtime. Perhaps we need an executive decree to get its servers back up and running.