My device would be a like a pair of headphones that would pick up out side sound and play back only the sounds and words that you wanted to hear. You could program it to cut out the words and sounds you did not like. it would be good for people that where offended by certain words.
-- loudboy, Dec 10 2007

Like this? Anticipation_20Retention_20Ears
SSP [squeak, Dec 11 2007]

"Hey, Elmer, you wanna go for coffee?"

"What? You want me to go 'ee'?"
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 10 2007


"I don't think this taxi driver will ever get me to Scunthorpe..."
-- lostdog, Dec 10 2007


what does that mean
-- loudboy, Dec 10 2007


It means that the e----acy of your device is in question. It is likely to filter out words inadvertently. And what if you decide to buy a Mazda RX8? You'd spend your entire life believing it was powered by a el rotary engine.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 10 2007


You're throwing this one out on a red herring technicality. That's a bit unfair. It's easy to write a text filtering algorithm that doesn't get hung up on partial words; surely doing that for speech wouldn't be that much harder.

When I find something offensive, I don't want to prevent myself from hearing it, I want to prevent everybody else from hearing it. It's the public discourse that I'm worried about, not any specific impact on any specific eardrum.
-- jutta, Dec 10 2007


I've not voted, and wouldn't throw this out on this technicality - just a bit of pernickityness. However, I suspect it would be much harder to do this with natural speech. One of the hardest problems for speech-recognition algorithms is to delineate words in the constant stream of sound. I might also add, very emphatically, that this is a subject I know almost nothing about.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 10 2007


<off-topic>//When I find something offensive, I don't want to prevent myself from hearing it, I want to prevent everybody else from hearing it.//

That rather surprises me; it seems to say that you see yourself as a benign censor, protecting the sensibilities of others.</ot>
-- angel, Dec 11 2007


This is probably possible, but you would be a little out of sync with the rest of the world.

Replacing incoming sound with edited sound should be fairly easy using noise-cancelling headphones, however before you can edit a word you have to recognise it, so by the time the device has listened to a word, recognised it and played it back out (or bleeped it), the speaker is already onto the next word. You will always be at least one word behind.

Given the poor processing power of small mobile devices and the fact that (as everyone has pointed out) it needs to recognise words within the context of the sentence, you will most likely be at least a sentence behind the rest of the world.

I'm voting [+] as this would actually make it a very interesting device to use. In fact, forget the bleeping altogether and just make a real-world audio delay.
-- wagster, Dec 11 2007


I am considering crying "magic" on this one. Not because I think it isn't possible given today's technology, but because the author doesn't say how it might be.

"Magic" is for ideas, like this one, that propose specific unavailable functionality without describing a lick of the plausible (or not so plausible) technology. Or am I wrong?

Then again, I'm mean that way when I have a stomach ache like the one I'm battling right now.
-- globaltourniquet, Dec 11 2007



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