We've all had it happen to us in an online game. Someone decides to run their mouth off after being killed too many times or because they think they're the greatest. Short of muting them outright, Microsoft may have a better solution in store.
The company has just filed a patent that will monitor real-time speech and apply a censor that will garble a user's words when something undesirable is said.
The patent specifically mentions that the real-time censoring can be applied to online games.
With a little luck and some fine tuning, this technology may start to appear in some future titles.
Source
The company has just filed a patent that will monitor real-time speech and apply a censor that will garble a user's words when something undesirable is said.
The automatic censoring filter employs a lattice comprising either phonemes and/or words derived from phonemes for comparison against corresponding phonemes or words included in undesired speech data. If the probability that a phoneme or word in the input audio data stream matches a corresponding phoneme or word in the undesired speech data is greater than a probability threshold, the input audio data stream is altered so that the undesired word or a phrase comprising a plurality of such words is unintelligible or inaudible. The censored speech can either be stored or made available to an audience in real-time.
The patent specifically mentions that the real-time censoring can be applied to online games.
For certain types of broadcasts, it would be preferable to employ a more automated approach that avoids the need to pay for or provide a human censor to monitor the broadcast, while still enabling the audio data to be censored at an appropriate level. For example, in massive multiplayer games, it would be impractical to employ a human censor to monitor the multitude of voice chat sessions that might be occurring at one time.
With a little luck and some fine tuning, this technology may start to appear in some future titles.
Source