News

Hear Obama Say All The Things You Want Him To

by Erin Corbett

A new website allows you to make the president say literally anything you want. The "Talk Obama To Me" website lets you type into a box, and then puts together sound bits from clips of Obama and creates the phrase, speaking it back to you. You may have seen some of the mashups of the president over the years. Sometimes he's singing "Uptown Funk" by Mark Ronson, or "Jumpman" by Future and Drake. But now you can have him say absolutely anything, and the site puts it together really fast.

I tried out "I endorse Donald Trump," which Obama hesitantly spoke back to me, and "I'm not a rapper," which he delivered with grace. The default text on the website reads "My mama don't like you and she likes everyone" from Justin Bieber's single "Love Yourself." I had to give Selena Gomez a shout-out and had Obama say, "Can't keep my hands to myself" — although it sounded more like "can't keep my pants to myself." Either works; whatever you have to say, Mr. President.

As a proud Chicago native, I also had to ask Obama to settle the score over New York pizza and Chicago deep dish. Thanks, Obama! Now everyone can know the truth: Sometimes, you have to eat pizza with a fork — although John Kasich's slice was definitely not worthy.

The website was created by Ed King, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University in the Linguistics department. His background in language studies makes the app even more interesting, considering the use of language and phonetics to put the phrases together. Asked why he put the site together and whether there were any restrictions in language, King tells Bustle, "My goal was just to make something fun for people to play with. I'd seen things like 'George Bush sings Sunday Bloody Sunday' ... and I wondered if I could generate videos like that automatically. So it was also partially a 'Can this be done?' project."

King noted that nothing in the coding in the backend stops the synthesizer from putting different words together, so you can have it say anything you want, including vulgar language. King said, "Vulgar words and swearing are some of the most popular things people have been making it say (along with people's names and things like 'Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer')."

Oh, how much fun we can have making Obama swear, endorse Trump, or affirm a conspiracy theory that a presidential candidate was also the Zodiac Killer, despite the fact he was a baby when those killings were taking place (guys, come on). The fascination, of course, is the idea that Obama would never say such things. Let's have just a little more fun before he leaves office.

Image: Screenshot from talkobamato.me (1)