Google's Nexus One censors your voice-to-text input, we #### you not
 

By Richard Lai http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.en...writer_rss.gif posted Jan 24th 2010 4:49PM



It'd be kinda funny if someone was live-bleeping your profanity, right? Sure, but five minutes later you'd sober up to regret and lingering annoyance. Turns out the Nexus One does it for real, courtesy of Google's speech-to-text engine -- it replaces notorious curses like the F and S words with a '####,' which is a more dramatic take on the Zune HD's now-obsolete Twitter censorship. As silly as this sounds, Google has come up with a good reason:

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.

Kudos for caring, but it wouldn't hurt to have an on / off option either -- after all, it's not like we're asking for pinch-to-zoom here, and we'll promise to use a swear jar.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/24/g...-input-we-you/