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The Mourner’s Kaddish as Rendered by Machine Transcription

Is God talking to us through the robots?

Paul Greenberg
2 min readFeb 8, 2022
“Page of Talmud” by Chajm. To view a copy of this license, visit undefined?ref=openverse&atype=rich

Recently an older relative died and as is “traditional” during COVID times a simultaneous Zoom funeral was held in parallel with the small graveside service. It was, as it should be, a somber, sober affair, full of love and gratitude for the departed and an apt celebration of her life.

But at a certain point during the ceremony I became aware that the machine transcription function had been engaged on the zoom platform and that a robot commentary was ticking beneath what we humans were listening to.

Here, then, is the Word of the Machine

The Mourner’s Kaddish as Told to Humans by Machines

Parts have been passed down the Irish

ba, Ba, ba, ba

The phone, your phone, I hate the phone

We got me

Through the HEB Ba ba ba

Sure to stay up and running

Ah Llama Llama

Ba ba

Make source of peace on I bring peace to those of…

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Paul Greenberg
Paul Greenberg

Written by Paul Greenberg

New York Times bestselling author of Four Fish as well as The Climate Diet and Goodbye Phone, Hello World paulgreenberg.org

Responses (3)

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Thank you for the laugh this morning. I've attended more than my fair share of zoom funerals but I've never noticed the live transcription before. I think Otter AI runs their transcriptions but I could be mistaken.

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I find this appalling

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How interesting! This brings in mind automatic writting and the explorations on surealism in the 1940s (e.g. Andre Bteron's The Automatic Message, 1933). Only here it is not the resutl of the subconsious but of poor algorithms!

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