Elric

January 25, 2010 at 8:40am

I'm sure the Mike Hunt's of this world are extremely thankful for this feature!

dmonkyking

January 25, 2010 at 8:27am

I think this is a smart move on Googles part to be forward thinking and nip any possability of having incidents and calls of complaints, because there phone is transcribing profanity when in fact the user said something else.  Although I do feel that Google should have made it possible to disable the filter for those who don't want it.

nduanetesh

January 25, 2010 at 8:24am

I think it's hilarious that the people who seem to be most up-in-arms over this are people who don't own Google phones.

 

If you guys can control your knee-jerk reactions for a second and give this a little thought, Google's stance actually makes perfect sense. If their voice recognition started returning curse words for people when they said something non-cursy, people would be all up in arms over that. Heck, it's not even hard to imagine there being an entire website devoted to "innocent" phrases you could utter, that would mistakenly return curses. The voice recognition doesn't get to say, "what did you just say?" if you mumble, or if there's too much background noise, or if someone else starts talking just as you're trying to make the voice recognition work.  It has to try to interpret whatever noisy mush it picks up, so there are bound to be errors (just as there are when people talk to you--you don't interpret what someone has said to you 100% perfectly every time), and Google is trying to make sure that your grandmother doesn't search for "ratchet" for your for Christmas, and end up with "bat shit".

 

That being said, yes it would be nice if there was an option in your Google account settings to change this. And I suspect there will be soon enough. 

 

PS. Just FYI, voice recognition doesn't happen on the phone. The phone records your sentence, then uploads the audio to Google's servers, which then interpret what you said and return the text to your phone. So it wouldn't be a phone setting to filter cursing in the results, but rather a setting in the Google Account associated with the phone. 

 

PPS. Here's a good example of how voice recognition can fail. I was riding in a car on a country lane and wanted to let the people at my destination know I was close. I fired up a text message and said, "Coming up the lane now." (Keep in mind the road was rough and it was noisy in the car.) The text returned? "Coming up the lame ass."  (Yes, uncensored.)  Funny, but not what I wanted to say. 

Neufeldt2002

January 25, 2010 at 7:41am

New black market app for the N1 from google: Voice Filter Be Gone, just simply install our app and your voice filter is magically removed for your swearing pleasure. /s

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I wanted a signature, but all I got was this ________

TechJunkie

January 25, 2010 at 7:05am

I agree! This is going WAYYY to far in my opinion. Who the fuck does google think it is?? I mean, I would never buy a google based phone (especially the N1) to begin with because I hate google about as much as I hate asparagus but if I were to buy one, it would be MY PHONE, not googles anymore, nor is the phone itself belong to T-mobile. This is flat out ludicrous.

Google.....## #### ########!!!!

Daemon

January 25, 2010 at 8:12am

Profanity filters on YOUR ######## phone, man IMHO this is going TOO far for Adults, but may be appropriate for family phones; particularly ones leased to chilrdren. Or perhaps for highly placed officials in key postions at places like say the National Film Board, Censors office. Political Correctness Overkill. This is how they toss a yoke on the frenzied public and force them to toe the line. We're going to end up like present day China at this rate. <Your County here>, under the oppressive regime of the political correct uber language nazi's. This is not MY Earth anymore its becomming some twisted Bizarro planet. Before long you'll be required to sign a EULA at birth saying you agree to all this oppressive stealing away of your life before you've even begun to live it. Remember folks this is Human Greed and Control Central. Why are humans so bizarre? >.<