Google Nexus One Voice to Text Censors Bad words

I thought this was kinda funny when I heard about this, apparently Google set up the Nexus One so that you can text people and type just by talking, that's not totally new, however the funny part is when it comes to swear words it turns them in to symbols.

Google told Reuters the voice recognition cleans up bad words as a way to make sure it doesn't accidentally use a bad word where a non-offensive word was intended

A Google spokeswoman provided a statement suggesting that replacing curses with # symbols aimed less at enforcing etiquette than to ensure that offensive words don’t accidentally appear in transcriptions - a potential concern given the fact that voice recognition technology is still not perfect.

"We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent," said Google.

In my opinion they prove a good point, my phone has a feature where I can text by talking, and well, it's pretty accurate but it's not all that uncommon for it to screw something up, and I would much rather have it bleep my words out especially if it thinks I said a swear word instead.



 Some rather interesting Voice to Text bloopers I've had while talking to people.
"I want to go out to eat with you" "I want to go eat you out"
"Whats up!?" "Fuck up"




In my case I kinda like the feature because as you can see, some inappropriate stuff has found it's ways into my conversations without me going for it.

I do think however this feature should be optional, it's freedom of speech.

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