Well, almost. It's optional. But it's there. Leave a comment on any YouTube video, and you'll see an audio preview button, which will give you a rough idea of what you'd sound like if you were delivering the message face to face. It's another example of the "think first, post later" idea that Google came up with earlier this week with GMail Goggles, where drunken internet users are required to solve tricky maths problems before their incoherent ramblings can be sent. But, as someone pointed out over at Slashdot, the kind of people who really need to use YouTube's audio preview feature are actually the kind of people who either won't use it, or simply wouldn't be able to work out what it was for.

So we can still look forward to comments such as the one under this video from "subkilla27", who categorically states that

its proppa moggy man, donut earings & all that its potent flapjak beatz lyk a double glazin salesman off his tits on jam roly-poly

If you can't imagine what that might sound like if YouTube read it back to you, well, here you go. Whether the horror of this audio clip would be sufficient to prevent subkilla27 from sharing his thoughts with the world is, sadly, debatable.

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