You must be aware that Google’s Nexus One has a speech-to-text function, so that you don’t have to type messages and notes. It seems that Google has done some cool house keeping and added a swear words detector. According to Reuters Nexus One automatically converts the swear words into a string of “#”s.

Upon asking for a comment a Google spokesperson said “feature is less about sanitizing users’ speech and more about making sure curse words don’t accidentally appear in transcriptions erroneously”. We would like to tell our readers that voice recognition is not a perfect science yet. Rhyming words can be translated erroneously. “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,” the statement said.

Although we don’t believe that any kind of censorship should be done but given the inaccurate nature of voice recognition systems we believe that it is good in the interest of users. How do you feel about this? Let us know in comments.

[cb type="company"]Google[/cb]