'I Want To Help, Not Hurt People': Teen Builds App To Filter Out Profanity On YouTube
CEDAR HILL (CBSDFW.COM) - It started with a wish: that YouTube was G-rated to protect the innocence of its youngest viewers.
"There's a lot of great content out there, but a lot of that content has swear words in them, and a lot of parents don't want their kids to be exposed to objectionable language," says 16-year-old Roman Scott of Cedar Hill.
So the rising high school junior, who had already built a computer, decided to build an app - and "Nofanity" was born.
"I combined the words no and profanity in order to make NoFanity, so it's kind of like a play on words there," he says.
The desktop app launches the YouTube browser and filters out the curse words on videos using speech recognition algorithms.
"I had to create a process to where the app would scan the audio for swear words and then it would find the timings on each word in the audio and bleep it out from there," he says.
Roman fought through setbacks and completed the app just this week.
"It was a lot of work, hundreds and hundreds of hours that he put in," says his mother, Elizabeth Scott. "It was just a labor or perseverance and dedication, and I was just so proud of him to finally have accomplished it."
"It's a really rewarding experience, because when you're creating something, you want to do something that helps people and not hurts people, so by me creating this app, I feel like I'd be able to make a difference in the lives of a lot of kids." Roman says.
You can download Nofanity through the website, Nofanity.com. It costs $2.99 a month and is for computers only.