CensEar

The CensEar is a device that censors out curse words, but only for you. Say you're walking down the street and someone screams 's**t' at the top of his lungs. You don't have to hear it, as the CensEar censors it from your hearing, replacing it with a 'beeep' sound- but you don't bother anyone else with your moral standards. You're happy, everyone else is happy- it's censorship and free speech existing harmoniously.

The device would be modeled after a hearing aid. Digital hearing aids translate sounds into computer code and back again, only amplified. Instead of an amplifier chip, the CensEar would have a chip with a speech-recognizion program on it. The programs recognize speech sounds, or phenomes, and translate them into typed words or commands. This program would recognize certain phenome combinations that make up swear words and replace them with other phenomes- specifically, the phenomes for 'beeeeep'. (More expensive models could sub in equivalent words like 'darn' or 'shucks'.) I guess you could get different words programmed into yours, depending on your morals- anything from just The Big Three to any anatomical references.

I've figured out the cost of a set. You'd need two devices, one for each ear. If a good hearing aid costs $1000, and a voice-recognizion program costs around $300, then, adding in the phenome-replacing technology, which I don't think currently exists, a basic CensEar set would cost about $3000.

Partial credit for this goes to my friends Sarah and Jonathon.