Google Nexus One blocks curse words

Try uttering some naughty words, and the speech to text feature in the smartphone will transcribe the foul expression into string of # symbols, like “what the ####.”

The discovery was made by a group at Reuters, who while playing with Nexus One noticed that if one used curse word while speaking, its voice to text feature simply blocked bad words from appearing in text form.

Reason behind censorship
It is definitely not Google’s business to see what kind of expressions a person is using while conversing. So what is the reason behind censoring curse words?

A Google spokesperson issued a statement saying that censorship is not aimed teaching people good manners, but the company wants to ensure that foul words should not accidently appear in text form.

"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," a company’s spokesperson told Reuters.

Other questions being raised
It is good that Google has recognized the limits of its smartphone’s technology, and is trying to ensure that the phone shows exactly what users are saying. But company’s no curse policy has surely raised interesting questions.

Does Nexus One take into account foul expressions used in other languages like Spanish, Hindi, Russian, French etc.?

Is there an engineer at Mountain View whose sole task is to write software that immediately identifies all offensive words?

Users’ reactions
These questions still need to be answered, but Google’s no curse policy has stirred quite a numbers of users who are discussing Nexus One censorship through various blogs and forums.

Though there are some users who believe that censorship is justified, there are others who argue that there should be no restriction on freedom of speech and that censorship by Google is somewhat inconvenient.

A user named ArtInvent commented on CNET News, “Google is absolutely doing the right thing for the right reasons. Speech to text is far from perfect, and I've no doubt if they left all the curse words in their transcription dictionary and treated them like any other word, they would indeed get inserted where they were not at all meant. And Google would get sued up one side and down the other.”

Another user by the name zetadog posted his view on digg.com saying that the censorship is really funny and asked, “who decides on what is inappropriate?”

“I would like to see this as an option that can be turned on or off!” stated a user named Pete Figueroa on nexusoneblog.com.