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

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.

Google’s Nexus One censors your voice-to-text input, we #### you not originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This post is tagged: android, censor, Censorship, google, google nexus one, GoogleNexusOne, nexus one, NexusOne, profanity, profanity filter, ProfanityFilter, speech recognition, speech to text, SpeechRecognition, swear, swear words, swearing, SwearWords, voice-to-text