Nexus One censors speech in voice-to-text feature
It seems that Google has done some censoring that actually makes a bit of sense for once when it comes to the voice-to-text feature of the Nexus One.
Google has taken a lot of flack for going along with censorship in China, something it is currently trying to reverse, and now Reuters has discovered that the company is doing some censoring right here in the United States. Before you get too worried though, it does make some sense this time around.
Google’s new Nexus One phone features a voice-to-text feature that will let you speak messages for texting into it, but the company admits it is not perfectly accurate yet. To help you avoid any possible social faux pas, it is converting anything that sounds like a curse word into “#” symbols. So if you want to text someone jokingly about where they are, it would appear as “Where the #### are you?”.
Google has issued an official statement about the situation:
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. Ultimately our goal is to return results that show exactly what you said, and we’re constantly working to improve the technology to better fit our users’ needs.
So, no, this isn’t Google trying to clean up your language for you, or anything nefarious, it is the company trying to compensate for the shortfalls of its technology. Hopefully someday the software will be able to compensate for these problems, but until then, we’re all just #### out of luck.
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January 25th, 2010
haha speaking of which, you should the autocomplete choices that comes up in google when you type “chinese people”!