161–170 of 286 posts
Colour me cynical, but when a corporation is under fire from consumers, regulators and activists, a soppy and heartstring-tugging ad is exactly what the doctors order . It is literally Google saying, "Oh look, cute puppies!" when faced with a global barrage of criticism about its disdain for user privacy or its own past promises.
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The same applies to the Scandinavian languages, to an extent. A Norwegian will generally have little issue understanding both Danish and Swedish, while Swedes and Danes have a much harder time understanding each other. However, us Norwegians receive a lot of influence from our neighbors and so understanding of their slight differences in language comes as a side-effect of that. A kind of younger sibling complex. May…
Nordic languages and Hindu-Urdu are great examples of how political language is. The reason Urdu was made a separate language was because of political reasons of the Mughals. Similarly, I believe Norwegians gave a separate legal status to Norwegian to make it distinct from Danish, as a mark of defiance to Danish colonial rule of the past. TO be fair Hindi, even though it grew more organically was given a formal statu…
For me, this is one of the areas where technology can enrich our lives.
I hope this is still hacker news rather than some emotional fools forum who ignore realities.
This is a beautiful ad and will make you emotional. As a person of Indian background I was able to relate to it easily but I wonder what others think of it? Are you able to feel the strong emotions based on reading subtitles or does language hamper the feelings and it loses its impact. Kudos to the team involved in this and thanks for posting this.
I'm anglo-Australian, and this definitely was very moving, even though it's not something I can relate to on a personal level.
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Do you prefer the generic "people fiddling with their devices on a sunny day, female voice playing buzzword bingo in the background"? Props for Google for being ballsy. I also love how people throw in the "multinational" qualifier as if this makes a company that much more evil.
I don't see how in any way Google is being "ballsy" here. It is a safe, soppy and relationships-oriented ad - in what world can that ever be "ballsy"? Furthermore, I don't see the parent use the word "evil" in his comment. That said, when a multinational that ferrets around billions of dollars in revenue around the world through obscure countries to avoid paying significant taxes in any of the countries it operates i…
Yes I was suitably manipulated. Good job, mass emotional manipulation team! But I am surprised they showed people searching for flight status and weather. Google Now is supposed to already know you're going to Delhi and just show you the weather there without you asking. Same for the flight status.
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A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually in…
A side note: as a teenager I spent one summer working in a clothing store in London, with a bunch of Spaniards and Italians. They spoke to each other using their respective tongue, and said they could understand each other. Just basics of course. Maybe someone from Spain or Italy could chime in here?
This is the ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHGDN9-oFJE - be sure to have subtitles on (unless you understand Hindi). One interesting observation about the ad: the search results that the girl deems to be good and informative are almost all Wikipedia hits. It's actually pretty similar to my situation: Google is basically a better Wikipedia searching tool than what Wikipedia provides.