
Can I opt out of Fucking Teams Transcripts??
If Teams doesn't want to hear what I have to say anyway, maybe we can mutually agree to not transcribing it for data mining purposes
Slinging the occasional expletive in casual conversations isn't so unusual these days – and online chinwags are no exception. But if you believe that such colorful language has no place in a professional business environment – virtual or otherwise – Microsoft is giving you a way of keeping it out of sight, at least in …
“Next on the agenda: one of our municipal customers near Salzburg is still reporting problems.”
“Oh no, not Fucking Austria again?”
(Yes, I know the town in question got tired of amusing the stupid English and renamed itself recently.)
I was about to suggest that they use the Urban Dictionary as the source-list, but on second thoughts, that would probably result in all transcripts being completely blank, because as far as I can tell every word or phrase ever in the English language has a NSFW definition on UD.
This should work well… or maybe not. I remember when Eudora implemented ‘peppers’ to show how hot your email was. Certain people (who, me? Surely not) went out of their way to get the max three peppers as often as possible. And, having used Eudora since 1993 I stopped using it. They wasted effort on peppers and ads instead of support for IMAP. I went to mail clients which supported IMAP. I was not alone.
and those dealing with connecting microwave waveguides or any similar pipe joins
They also seem a lot more precious about it. I remember several years ago while on a business trip watching daytime TV. One of the characters got their head blown apart by a gunshot quite graphically but their partner's response was bleeped out.
WTF kind of country is it that considers the gore of a head being blown apart to be fine to watch whilst objecting to profanity?
Hmm I really shocked a colleague in America by telling him that I was off to a pub quiz at the Cock Inn that evening.
He thought it was really offensive whereas it is a normal pub name round here… I never thought of that but it has been the same name for over 200 hundred years.
Yes. At my wedding in the US, my sort-of informal best man was an old friend and colleague from the UK. He’s a smoker, and my American sister-in-law found it absolutely hilarious when he said he was “going off for a fag”.
I think that by the 60th or 70th time the joke had maybe started to pall, though!
(My wife had given everyone burner phones so that the UK contingent could keep in touch without roaming charges; He and sis-in-law and my brother also conspired to swap the SIMs around; once swapped, suggestive SMSs were sent to various in-laws that obviously appeared to come from other in-laws, and much hilarity ensued. I don’t remember much else of the wedding, but in the words of Rowley Birkin, I was very, very drunk.)
When the Science Museum in London first had an interactive terminal that kids could type on, TPTB foresaw this exact problem and created a file containing words that should be filtered out of the kids typing. A couple of days later something went horribly wrong and it ended up displaying the file of forbidden words. This was discovered by teachers who wondered why their charges were so avidly clustered round the terminal taking notes.
We had to use Zoom early on when it first turned on live transcripts.
We were not impressed that its generation was inexact when it turned the word Nuxeo into Nazis.
Yes, you read that right, as we discovered to our horror live in a call and then after a customer conference call when the transcript was reviewed.
It happened several more times before they did something about it.
It seems easy.... filter the swearing... yes, let's do that. But as with everything the low hanging fruit is easy but the hard part is the edge cases, the words that mean different things in different places, the words that have multiple meanings and so on.
So as ever in tech, they cobble something together, announce how wonderful it will be, move on, and it turns out not to work well enough to be useful.
Plus ca change.