Google Nexus One's text to speech function censors swearing

From http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2010/01/25/google-nexus-one%E2%80%99s-text-to-speech-function-censors-swearing/

Published January 25, 2010 12:00 pm by Mic Wright

Google’s Nexus One features built-in voice recognition but don’t expect it to join in with your Malcom Tucker-esque foul-mouthed ranting. It seems Google’s voice tech takes a hard-line on swear words, censoring them outright…


Reuters discovered that the Google Nexus One’s voice-to-text transcription feature replaces ‘offensive’ words with strings of # symbols. The censorship seems to apply to all the most common four letter words.

Google says its not about censorship but more to do with protecting Google Nexus One users from unintended profanity. It claims that replacing potentially offensive words with # symbols means that if the phone get confused by your speech, it won’t accidentally offer up swear words.

Google’s spokesperson said: “We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we went to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return a profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent…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.”