Kindle Fire apparently has a “secret” profanity filter for spoken words

There are times when you just want to send out profanity on your social media account or on a messenger thread with friends, whether you’re having a bad day or your favorite character did something stupid or you’re fed up with the government. But apparently, some of these tech companies are telling us we can’t curse or something, at least in the speech recognition part of the device. Amazon seems to be one of those as it has a “profanity filter” for its Kindle Fire, as one website/blog/hub has discovered.

Someone from the Digital Reader was browsing Twitter on his Kindle Fire HD when he wanted to tweet something out that had a curse word. But his keyboard app, more specifically the speech recognition feature of it, deleted the sentence. And even when he tried to repeat that sentence, it once again deleted it. He became curious and so tried to explore it more and discovered the “secret” profanity filter.

Specifically, it’s the device’s keyboard app and its speech recognition feature that is screening your words and not accepting profanity. If you try to type them the regular way on the onscreen keyboard, it will go through so at least there’s that. If you’re familiar with George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words (which we won’t mention here), all of those are included in the filter. Some words like “piss” and “hell” are auto-corrected into “this” and “hello”. There are some other words that make it through so the filter isn’t always discriminating.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to disable or enable the filter as well, which may be kind of frustrating for some. So you probably will just have to resort to typing out those profane words that you’re longing to send out to the world or to someone. But maybe Amazon is also telling you to think about it first before sending and so you cannot use the speech recognition feature for that one.

Of course Amazon isn’t the only one that has such a filter. The iOS keyboard also can sometimes be “puritanical” while Google also has a spoken word profanity filter, at least on Android devices. For the latter, it will replace the characters with asterisks

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