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Microsoft Seeking to Patent Automatic Censorship
theodp writes "Microsoft is back at the USPTO, this time seeking a patent for the automatic censorship of audio data for broadcast, a system and method for automatically altering audio to prevent undesired words and phrases from being understandable to a listener as originally uttered."
Sounds like it will be used primarily for Xbox Live to make sure 9 year olds don't get cussed out by some pissed off gamers. Sounds like it'll be a feature most consumers will welcome.
This sounds a lot more novel than most of the other patents they get that tend to get highlighted on Slashdot. Is it totally novel? Well, I can't speak for any of the experts out there, but at least it's not blaringly obvious, commoditized technology.
The rest of the world will do what Battlestar Galactice does: Made up swear words. BSG can't drop the F-bomb much for administrative/ratings reasons, so they use the word "Frak". I could see a lot of new swear words popping up if this happens.
I doubt that the USPTO will bat this down, but there's prior art on all sorts of speech recognition. This one just happens to deal with censorship and adding metadata to the audio stream based on that.
As you all can see though this patent was filed back in 2004, so it's been around for a while. The idea isn't anything new, nor is the application. What would be interesting is the broadcast industry's response to this thing.
I forsee a future where you cannot criticize Microsoft in podcasts created and streamed using Windows. "Microsoft Sucks", could be considered offensive.
hey now, if they'll just allow us to define what is worth censoring i'm all for this technology but the choice should be made in the home, not in washington.
the first thing i'd put on an explicitive list: commercials
Let me change that just a bit, make that "play XBox Live unsupervised" and the answer is the same kind of parent who will buy their kid the latest Grand Theft Auto game even though it's rated Mature and the employee at the store points out them it's rated mature and explains what that means then let them play it unsupervised. Then they later discover what they'd already been told is true about the game and they raise hell about their kid being able to play it and blames the store, the game company, some vast conspiracy, aliens, etc. anyone but themselves.
And yes, I speak from experience, worked for a while at a Wal-mart between IT jobs back around the time GTA Vice City came out. Had plenty of parents that I explained to very politely what a Mature rating meant and what was in the game and had them shrug and say "Well he wants it" and them buy it anyway. The reason I modified that is because I ran into a few (very few sadly) parents who knew what the ratings meant and would take the time to read all the info on the game boxes, all the sub-warnings, etc. and decide whether or not they would buy the game. I saw one Dad look through 4 different games and tell his kid "you can't have this one or this one, but either of these will be fine, we'll play it together". Now if only more parents did that.
Cingular, Sprint, Verizon are in trouble if MS get the patent, and if MS think the wireless phonce call is "broadcast".
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Automatically detecting the word !@#$ and bleeping it out doesn't seem to be like a bad feature to me, as long as its optional. Maybe it's dumb that they're trying to patent it, but the idea isn't a bad one.
As some of the posters rightfully noted, this won't solve the problem. One of the symptoms of not solving would be "invented" cursive words. The problem lies deeper.
Think for a minute, why do we curse? We curse to express our emotions. Instead of using words that describe the emotion exactly, like: "I am very angry right now", we spit expletives. We do that to alleviate the anger (for example) caused by this situation. Emotiones expressed in this way help quickly release the pain caused by the anger. But.
But they do not remove the cause of the anger. Bad driver manners will continue, and there is little you could do about that whether with anger or without it.
So what would be a healthier reaction? Right. Anger management. You will train yourself not to react angrily, by channelling anger into correct actions, not emotions.
This is what we have to teach our kids spending on that much more effort than protecting them from hearing infamous seven words.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
you are aparently one of those people who doesn't know there's such a thing as games rated less than M. If they want to release a game that's rated E, like some kind of racing game, it'd be a nice feature to flip a switch and not have to worry about hearing "you're a gay nigger jew" from every 20th person. I'd further submit that the alogirthms to do this are not intuitive. If you think censorship is bad, make you you make it clear to microsoft that this technology should be able to be turned off.
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
--- Do you believe in the day?
I know most of the replies here are thinking about this in terms of curse words. But the first thing I jump to is the issue of censorship in China. We already know that the search results are filtered over there (see Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). Seems like the next logical step.
Tinfoil hats off please, this is for Speech and Media Encorder Services...
So an employee or customer using realtime voice services could use an automated service and the company using MS Speech Server technologies could tell the system to not let them broadcast 4 letter words through the service for example.
Imagine a phone system service that allowed a customer to send messages to friends or family, and lets say the company was Apple using the product, they could use the MS technology to ensure the customer didn't tell everyone the service targeted to go get F**ked...
Another example would be a live broadcast that is encoding to Windows Media going out over the FCC air or the Internet, this could keep a bad caller on 'radio' show (for example) from violating FCC rules in realtime.
It could also be used for parents to censor TV or Audio off the Internet or Via a TV Box so they could limit certain words from their kids.
Get it?
As for 'censorship', come on lets pretend the easter bunny is trying to take over the world with toxic chocolate eggs or something more exciting.
People who aren't ass-backwards and try keeping any mention of sex five miles from children.
Seriously, the sex in that game is-
Spouse: What, aren't you going to come to bed?
You: (yes | no)
(insert black screen with ridiculous giggling and spouse saying "ooh")
(return to game with spouse making some sort of lame joke)
Twelve-year-olds might get all giggly about it, but it's nothing new. Hell, if you're not loitering around your house for no reason all the time it's not even very likely to happen...
Nevermind theories about that other stat, your character's sexuality...
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me