Microsoft Patents the Censoring of Speech

theodp writes "On Tuesday, the USPTO awarded Microsoft a patent for the Automatic Censorship of Audio Data for Broadcast, an invention that addresses 'producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible.' The patent describes methods for muting offensive words and replacing them with less offensive versions, and 'a third alternative provides for overwriting the undesired word with a masking sound, i.e., "bleeping" the undesired word with a tone.' After all, there's nothing worse than being subjected to offensive speech when you're shooting someone in the head."

Comments

Re:Useless

[4e617474]

Trust me when I say you can come up with new curses faster than you can code them into an automatic censorship proram...

Pondering this make me feel a whole lot better about the whole enterprise. I'm all in favor of protecting budding young minds from the use of profanity as a substitute for creative expression... by teaching them that profanity is the inspiration for expressing yourself creatively. Also I like the thought of someone going to their manager and saying, "I need a ruling on 'defecating masonry'. Can we let that go?"