Google’s Live Transcribe is another wonder tool that helps people to hear in meetings, public gatherings, and anywhere where sound is being communicated.
But it has a problem.
Here’s a warning before you read on: if naughty words offend you, please click away now. This article uses explicit language to tell the cautionary tale that cannot be avoided.
Why Google Live Transcribe is a modern-day marvel
Google Live Transcribe offers an instant text-to-speech service that is a lifeline for many situations.
If you’re in a noisy coffee shop, for example, it knows how to pick out the voice of the person you want to hear speaking and turn their speech into words. It can work out the nuances, the paragraphs, and the punctuation.
And while it is not perfect, it is pretty effective and means people can manage to get by.
But … it has a big problem. And one that should be addressed as soon as possible.
Live Transcribe makes me laugh
Google Live Transcribe is a lifeline.
When it goes wrong it goes badly wrong, even if you’ve told it not to serve up swear words. Language is more fluid than that.
Have you ever been in a place where you cannot laugh and something happens that makes your chuckle muscles start up? Unless they exercised, they champ at the bit to be let out. And that makes it harder not to laugh.
You want to giggle. You want to smile. You want to chuckle loudly as your belly aches with joy. You want to let your mirth be uncontained.
So you try and suppress it, and the more you suppress it, the harder it is to hold it in.
A guffaw, a titter, a smirk give way to an involuntary snort that someone next to you notices. And their knowing look sparks a chain reaction.
There is no holding back when you eventually get the giggles. You either have to leave the room or face the consequences.
This happened to me a few weeks ago in a church service.
We were at a serious moment, about the church’s finances and how more donations were needed to help keep a project going.
The person at the front was sharing about how someone had given some big gifts, and how marvellous that was.
Except that’s not how Google Live Transcribe caught it.
While the profanity filter is firmly on, which manages to bleep out swearing and naughty words, Google does not manage the context very well. And for someone who devours Roger’s Profanisaurus in the adult comic Viz, when it comes to double entendres, I like it when someone gives me one.
However, this wasn’t a double entendre. It was quite blatantly singular in nature.
The person was speaking about big gifts, but Live Transcribe thought it was something else.
Here is the Live Transcribe that popped up on my phone, midway through a service. Clearly the sound was not clear enough for Live Transcribe to accurately transcribe the audio, so some mistakes were made:
“Is so thank you, Adam. Thank you for those fans as well. I understand, he’s a very generous gifts. It’s a bit in the Bible where all the people are getting so much with the Temple of the law. That most accuracy says you’ve got to stop now.”
So far, so gobbledgook that just about makes sense if you were there and understood the context of what was being said.
But Live Transcribe sadly goes downhill thereafter:
“Here, you’re so jealous, you’ve got enough. And and I my feeling is in terms of Jennifer very generous big dicks.”
How on earth are you meant to react to that when it pops up, out of context, in the middle of a serious moment?
Google Live Transcribe shows what noise it is picking up at the moment in time and I am wearing the cone of shame: Laughing.
Was this Live Transcribe mistake a one-off? Nope
Live Transcribe has been in my arsenal for a while now, ever since I got caught out by a mistake and the errors keep on coming.
Here’s another:
“(She) continued to that ball into the rain as my manager, but she’ll fall in the mail that you were going to our area. So almost They can’t spread the sex with me. Always, if This thing’s going arrived with, with men, so that’s coming in. Um, Oh”.
And another:
“It’s Council of breasts. She’s the way it be on one of your genital. You’ve seen. It’s pretty interesting to see what Comes from that.”
Oh and…
“Yeah, I brought these I can’t Send send them Victoria’s Secret. She started with her titties Now. Un, so um, quite a”
And from another church service:
“And thank you so much for your generous giving on your, Some people have sex, maybe are talking a lot about money at the moment. I know, I do that…”
So clearly, Google’s Live Transcribe has sex on the brain.
How can Viz Comic solve this problem?
Well, for quite some time now, the adult comic Viz has been featuring a collection of naughtiness that it calls Roger’s Profanisaurus.
Since issue 87, which came out in 1998, readers have been contributing an endless collection of euphemisms for various scatalogical and sexual pursuits, inventive, creative, crude, rude, offensive, and often hilarious, but also not appropriate to share here.
They have been collected into several books, marketed as “the foulest-mouthed book ever to stalk the face of the earth”, featuring more than 20,000 very creative ways to bring toilet humour into a conversation. It is not for the faint-hearted.
The latest edition, published in 2024, has more than 700 pages.
If only someone in Google’s back offices would start adding the vulgarity to the phrase banks that Live Transcribe uses … to a human it’s fairly obvious that in an office or church conversation, no one will be talking in a sexually suggestive way. Well, they shouldn’t be.
While humans can get the context fairly quickly, machines take everything they hear as literal truth.
So, Google boffins need to take a leaf or 700 out of Viz’s books, programme in the rude phrases and add a marker to them so that if its AI tools think it’s heard them, it can check the rest of a sentence to figure out if that really was what the speaker had in mind.
Why does this matter?
You may think that this is all rather trivial, but if you are in a business or sensitive meeting the last thing you need is your mind to be taken to the gutter and not be in a place where you can laugh it off.
And you certainly shouldn’t be put in a place where you have to explain some vulgarity to someone when you are trying to be professional.
It might be funny when presented like this, but when you’re trying to be serious, it’s just not on.
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This is a great way to describe both sides of the experience.
Google Live Transcribe really is a powerful tool-especially in situations like meetings or public spaces where catching every word can be difficult. The real-time transcription and ability to follow conversations is genuinely impressive.
At the same time, it’s true that context and language nuance can still trip it up. Small errors or misinterpretations can completely change the meaning, especially in casual or fast conversations.
Still, tools like this are making a big difference-it’s exciting to see how much better they’ll get over time.