Holy s***! Google’s Nexus One was apparently designed by a team of puritanical engineers determined to fulfill the now-tired mantra of “do no evil.”
According to Reuters, the integrated voice recognition feature of the Android-based PureAPhone automatically replaces “offensive expressions” with a boring string of # symbols.
“Thus, a jocular text message inquiring about a buddy’s whereabouts is transcribed as ‘Hey #### where are you?’ on the Nexus One; A spirited rejoinder to a dubious assertion becomes ‘that’s bull #### and you know it.’”
A Google spokesperson told Reuters that the Nexus One PureAPhone filtered potentially offensive or inappropriate results to avoid unpleasant situations in which a spoken query could be “misrecognized” and mistaken for profanity.
“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 spokesperson added.