By Cuss words. Curse words. Swear words. Call them what you want, but the Google Nexus One will simply call them #### if you use them with the voice-to-text input option. Go ahead and try it out: send a text message to a buddy with a bleepedy-bleep here and a zinger of an f-bomb there and you’ll see exactly what we mean.
(image via drooker.com)
The folks at Reuters got the reasoning directly from Google:
“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,” said Google.
“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,” the statement continued.
There should AT LEAST be an on/off switch for this, don’t you think? Afterall, we know how Google feels about censorship.
Sounds good to me. Last thing I need is to text my girlfriend bring home potatoes tonight, and it ends up saying fuck your mother. Thanks for looking out for me Google…
I wonder what it would say if I tried to text “I’ll swing my truck by in a bit”
When you text it does not sensor it, just text to speech. This is a bit late considering the droid has done the same thing since release.
Yeah, as soon as I got cupcake on my MT3G I noticed this with the text to speech. It, of course, does not do this with normal text entry.
The Nexus didn’t start this, Android has been censoring voice-to-text since Cupcake at least.
funny how google is against censorship in china. and then there’s this.
(i know its completely different, but still)
I think the dangerous thing for android is it’s blog community.
Now, you’re complaining about naughty words being censored?
What’s wrong with you android blog guy’s?
If they’re no news about android don’t post nothing.
Remember the iphone couldn’t take videos, didn’t have MMS, 3G and a lot of stuff.
All that didn’t stop millions of happy people buy it so stop complaining about something you pretend to appreciate.
I do not see the point to the censoring words from voice-to-text. I mean it is not like people would trust the application 100% and just send the texts right afterwards without proof reading it over :/ People have accents and may annunciate or pronounce the same word differently. I think if you want to say F*CK, then you should be able to say it and have it appear in your text. What happened to right of speech! I guess when you’re done dictating into the phone, you can go back and edit the omitted censor words back in before you send the text XD
Signing off
-Roze-
This is hardly censorship. Now then, if they replaced it when you typed it out, no matter what, without the ability to turn it off, then I’d be royally pissed. Fact of the matter is, voice to text isn’t perfect, in fact it’s quite far from it. This is a logical addition to the service in order to keep someone from losing their job or pissing someone off due to a speech to text screw up. Grow up and stop trying to make mountains out of mole-hills.
After reading their explanation, it makes sense to me.
why are people saying that google doesnt censor things in china? they do. im pretty sure one of the words were “constitution” amongst others.
@ryan your a wussy.
I think its pretty funny and could care less. Leave ’em guessing on what you meant to say mother####ers.
@marco, I think you’re looking for “don’t post anything.” don’t post nothing is a double negative which is you telling them to post articles when there is nothing to say. If you don’t like the article don’t, read it. I, for one, had no clue about this until now. I also hate coming to Phandroid and seeing no new articles. I would rather have something pointless to read then nothing at all.
Ooohh!I want to post the “pointless weekly bullshit”column for phandroid!!What do ya think,Rob,what kind of salary,retirement,401 are we looking at here?
@Terran, thank you for the explanation. I’m a french guy with a very bad english.
I don’t want a community of fanboys like apple’s one but neither a community of never satisfied people.
I see articles like “is the nexus one a mistake made by google?” on android blog’s.
No android no phandroid. Don’t be submissive but be constructive.
There’s hope here but blogs like androidandme are already losts.
Some times, it’s like this blog was created by apple fanboys in an evil plan to throw f###### punches in the back of android.
Don’t throw to much s##t on what you love or you’ll end up with nothing than a pile of s##t.
That’s funny, and I just thought it didn’t know the word for “whore.”
funny thing this was mentioned: i follow Neil Gaiman (author of Coraline, Sandman, etc.) on Twitter and yesterday he said that on the nexus one, if you follow the curse word by saing “dot com”, it will show up.
Mine wont even use those pound symbols it just says no matches found
It is true, the DROID does the same thing with voice to text searches in Android system apps. If you use Talk To Me app, to voice to text for the translation curse words are not edited out. I have not tried other non-goog apps but I looks like it is just core goog apps effected.
Yeah an on/off switch would be nice, or a dialog asking the user if they meant to say “go fuck yourself” in that text to their employer. But this isn’t news. It seems like it’s only recently been discovered by some people, perhaps while trying to voice to text “This Nexus One is fucking awesome”.
Sometimes you just need to say the word FUCK because no other word will do.
Somebody fucked up.
@presto – Really? That could be dangerous if you’re telling someone to check out duck.com.
@terran – I always get a laugh out of it when someone who feels it’s necessary to correct the grammar of others makes grammar errors of their own in the same message. I’ll let you find it.
They go a little overboard it censored freaking when I said it on my nexus :( I wish there was a way to turn it off
http://lmgtfy.org/?q=girlfriend
Someone had to say it ;)
Looks like we all have to go back to second grade language and use terms like “dootie-head” and “booger-face”