Hi, I am the developer of the app Envision AI which does process images to extract information like text, faces, scenes, etc. I just tried to process a Kevin Spacey meme through it and it provided me with a description saying "Looks like Kevin Spacey in a suit and a tie" and the provided me with the text that was on the image.

Using the same algorithms I used to build that, it is totally possible for me to build an extension that can be taught to recognise memes from a library of memes. I would, in fact, love to build that. Could you guys tell me more about how would you want the output to be? Should it describe the image or just state what the meme is. How would you like the text that is usually on the meme to be provided so that it makes most sense.

This is the kind of idea I myself find much more interesting then the endless vibrating cains we get on here. So many people ask questions about vibrating things you would think we were talking about sex toys. As far as a data base for meems, I wonder if this could be useful. http://knowyourmeme.com/
I don't know a lot about meem culture, although I would like to know more; one issue I see for the kind of project your talking about is that I believe one of the key things about meems is that people create and use thousands of altered versions of meems. For example, if a cartoon cat becomes a meem, people who use that meem might remix it and use the cartoon in a new way. From what I understand, this remix aspect is key to meems, and it might make any auto detection project very difficult. Just my two bits, cool idea.

As a former sightling with limitted understanding of programming, this shouldn't be incredibly hard. If the programmer just fed in images pre-text, like pepe the frog,it could definitely recognize the base meme at least.

The issue would be with contexualizing text and understanding it.

To simplify, there's two real kinds of memes, and then reaction images are a separate category.

- Images with text. They're simple, usually images from a popular show, or some comic/fan art. Pepe the frog is from a comic showing a frog peeing with his pants around his ankles, if I remember right, and the original frame said "Feels good, man." but now his weird facial expression is used for... everything.

- Images that have significant changes. These are harder to explain. There's one going around that's a picture of the Chum Bucket and Krusty Krab from spongebob, with gross/bad things on the chum bucket, and good things on the Krusty Krab. There's also a lot with no text, like stock images with the faces changed. I know there's one that was a guy and his girlfriend, with the girlfriend looking unhappy because he was looking back at another girl.

That one was used for things like gamers, over the guy's face, Destiny, a video game, over the girlfriend's face, and Warframe, a similar game viewed as better, over the other girl's face.

With things like that, it'd be hard to contextualize them. Maybe if there was a bespecular type of app that could recognize what memes are which kind, then send the memes off to people to confirm or edit the description, to make them make more sense.

Possibly with some sort of watch ads to get a single meme described per ad, and just buy a ton of meme tokens to be able to get multiple memes described and all that kind of stuff.

NVDA has built in OCR. If you're talking about image macros, which is what a lot of people mean when they say 'memes' than that should cover it.

Hey! Have you seen us /r/TranscribersOfReddit around Reddit? We do a similar thing manually; all transcribed posts go to /r/ToR_Archive, so you can browse those and find the transcriptions in the comments. Please do ask any questions or give any feedback, we really appreciate it 😊

Hi mahakart, this sounds like it has a lot of potential. I'm not exactly sure what would be the best method for conveying info about the meme. I do think you would want to describe the picture, not just give the name of the meme, because if you had not come across the meme before the name would not offer a lot of info or context.

One side question I have; I have heard of your app, but I have not tried it yet. It's on iOS right? How would you run the pictures of the memes through it? If I'm browsing a twitter app do I have to click on the picture, and open it in your app? I'm only asking because such a process might take a little too long for me to use in casual situations. I know that what you can do in iOS is limited, do you have a Windows version of your service? An NVDA add on, for example, would be amazing. I would think that would be pretty easy to make and you could activate the service with just one key stroke, just like the OCR hot key that is now built into NVDA. I'm sorry that I have gotten off topic, I just think having a service like yours on Windows would be great. During my day job as an web accessibility tester I'm always having to say that random pictures on web sites don't have proper alt text. It would be really cool if I could say, the picture of the students standing in the classroom, for example, does not have alt text. Thanks again mahakart, cool stuff.