The Google Nexus One had quite a few features that smartphone users were interested in, one of them being its speech recognition and speech to text service. Say anything into your mobile phone and it will be converted into text, at least that is the theory.
Reuters recently tested the speech to text feature on the Google phone and discovered that not all speech is converted into text. Foul language and curse words for instance are not transcribed as spoken but are instead censored and replaced with pound (#) signs.
In other words, in a private conversation with a friend, you may say something inappropriate but the text will come out as “##### want to go for a #### drink?”
As to why Google elected to add this feature, a spokewoman did say:
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
Google isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last to filter bad language, Microsoft had done something similar with their Zune HD Twitter application but in that case, the Redmond company did indicate that a future Microsoft patch would address this.
Via: Geeky Gadgets, Reuters
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