Comic Relief introduces celebrity swear jar app
Howard Lake | 19 March 2017 | News
For Red Nose Day, Comic Relief has released a swear jar app that will donate 20p of your money to the charity every time your phone hears you swear.
The app, which is free to download, uses Google’s voice recognition technology to spot choice epithets, blasphemies and potty mouth Anglo-Saxon expletives.
And you’ve only got yourself to blame. For the donations to flow, you have to pledge a maximum pot of money from which the app will extract and donate 20p each time it hears your filth.
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There is even an element of gamification involved. You can compare your four-letter-word creativeness (and it recognises more than that of course) with that of others, including your friends, on the ‘Wall of Shame’.
The swear jar app features several of Comic Relief’s celebrity supporters, and several more have demonstrated how it works in YouTube videos. We’ll let you find those as they are NSFW.
Turn the air blue for Red Nose Day
The app, developed with Grey Advertising, will track your swearing for a maximum of 10 minutes at a time, and you can end the session before that if you wish. And you get to initiate the listening session. The app isn’t listening to your speech all the time.
The app is only available to those aged 18 or over. And it has a limited life-span: it is live between 17th March 2017 and 7th April 2017. After that period, the app will de-activate.
The terms and conditions state that “all donations are final”, so there’s no arguing with Google and Comic Relief over what constitutes profanity.
F in Fundraising
So, if you want to put the F in Fundraising (or effin’ fundraising), you can download the app for iOS and for Android.
Other Comic Relief apps?
This year Comic Relief has created another app, The Red Enojis, available for iOS users. It lets you insert and send Red Nose Day emoji (or an ‘Enoji’) in iMessages.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.