THE GLORIOUS software empire, upon which the sun never sets, has managed to get a patent for censoring speech.
Microsoft has been awarded patent number 7,437,290 in which an input audio data stream comprising speech is processed by an automatic censoring filter in either a real-time mode, or a batch mode.
The big idea is that the speech is censored so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible. It means that if your call centre employee starts swearing at a customer, the punter would never know. If the software was installed on a company phone then it would be impossible to say anything that the company didn?t want you to say.
