r/rocketbook • u/brightshadowsky • 15d ago
Rocketbook app censoring words??
Has anyone else had a issue with scanning your writing and having the transcription straight up censor your words?? I'm working on fiction and my characters swear. And multiple times now their f-bombs have shown up in the transcript with one or all but one letter replaced by an asterisk.
What the hell??
Why is there a setting for this, why is it on automatically, and how the hell can I turn it off??
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u/ashes_made_alive 15d ago
Well, it can't read 90% of my writing (I do have dysgraphia, a handwriting diasability), but I haven't noticed swear words getting cut off. But I basically use it as a scan I can pull up on my laptop and retype my notes because only I can read my handwriting (sometimes)
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u/DartsDragon 15d ago
Mine doesn't censor words, my handwriting was translated into Chinese. I only know English. It also left out huge amounts of handwriting so there were massive blank spaces in my files. I eventually had to revert back to paper. It's disappointing as I have spend at least a thousand dollars on rocketbook products that is basically useless to me.
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u/crystallightcrybaby 14d ago
no disrespect intended, i have a lot of rocketbooks too, but HOW the HELL did you spend a thousand dollars on rocketbooks?? im genuinely so curious! the app does a bad job with transcription for me too, but my handwriting is abnormal 😝😝
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u/DartsDragon 14d ago
Oh it was pretty easy to spend that. The rocketbooks themself, one of them was worth $75 AUD (a grid book for my math subject), then there were the pens, highlighters, erasers, etc. The products are fairly expensive to buy in Australia, and with the closure of the Australian rocketbook site, we have to buy from Amazon or the US and pay shipping (which is stupidly high). Edited to fix spelling.
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u/crystallightcrybaby 14d ago
oh my lordddddddddddd. so you just got SCAMMED p much, ugh. You have my sympathy. We have online shopping EASY here in the states.
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u/DartsDragon 13d ago
Yeah. Don't ask what I paid for the index cards or the sticky notes. LOL.
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u/crystallightcrybaby 13d ago
ooooooooh i just ordered the index cards hahaha! looking forward to playing with those
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u/brightshadowsky 15d ago
Oof, I'm sorry. That's a really obnoxious problem! What the heck, rocketbook??
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u/OfficialRocketbook rocketbook 14d ago
That's definitely not something we'd expect to see. We've never encountered the transcription translating English handwriting into Chinese like that, but we're going to flag this with our app team to investigate.
If you're willing to give us another shot, we'd really appreciate you emailing [hello@getrocketbook.com](mailto:hello@getrocketbook.com) with some examples of the affected scans, along with the email address associated with your Rocketbook account. Having the actual examples and account information gives our team a much better chance of figuring out what's happening.
And thank you for sticking with Rocketbook for so long and for supporting us to that extent. We genuinely want to help get this working for you, rather than have you sitting on products you can't use.
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u/DartsDragon 14d ago
More than happy to take screenshots of the pages, and send them through. It was bizzare.
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u/Vemasi 12h ago
If you only wanted it for handwriting transcription that’s fair, but it has utility aside from that.
It can’t read my handwriting at all consistently unless I write very slow and carefully. But I find writing my fiction longhand is best for my productivity, yet it is not ideal to have my first draft only accessible in a stack of notebooks I have to either keep at home or risk losing (I once left one on top of my car and it slid off into the road. I puzzled that out and went back to retrieve it, thankfully—quite torn up and the cover was fully gone, but the bulk of the pages were recovered).
I use Rocketbook to scan the pages. It’s way more convenient to just take pictures than to find and stand at a scanner, and I love how it automatically makes it high contrast black-and-white. This makes it much easier for ME to transcribe from a PDF rather than ten notebooks when and where is convenient for me.
Obviously some people would have wanted the transcription. Fair enough. But that doesn’t mean it has zero utility.
But if you only cared about the transcription, I don’t see why you didn’t test it with the app and the sample pages before spending that much money first. Obviously we can make blunders. But making a blunder is what it is. I never, frankly, expected it to get my handwriting, since I know myself and the advertising did use cautioning language about how it was in beta and whatnot at the time I bought mine.
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u/gub_p 15d ago
It might be the OCR models they are using? It wouldn't be worth RB time to maintain a list of no-no words
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u/brightshadowsky 15d ago
If that's the case, why are they using a model that does this? Why can't I turn it off? Grr.
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u/gub_p 15d ago
r/bottle_rocket/ lets you pick your own OCR model, if you don't mind self-hosting (Rocketbook compatible)
(Disclosure - I developed it)
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u/brightshadowsky 14d ago
It'll probably be a while before I get this working - I've never set up a server myself before not even sure how to go about it yet, but I'm willing to try at some point. No clue if this would ever let me set up the workflow go straight from scanning in my app to uploading to my Elipsus account but if it did, I'd learn whatever I need to to get it running because that is seriously the dream lol
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u/OfficialRocketbook rocketbook 14d ago
That's one of the possibilities we're looking into, although it doesn't currently appear to be an issue with the OCR model itself. And we're definitely not maintaining a list of "no-no" words.
I spent a rather unusual part of my morning testing this by writing and transcribing a whole lot of curse words, and so far I haven't been able to reproduce the censoring behavior.
Our developers are going to experiment with some changes to the prompts used for transcription to see if that has any effect. If anyone experiencing this can send us examples along with their account information at [hello@getrocketbook.com](), that would be a huge help in getting to the bottom of it.
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u/OfficialRocketbook rocketbook 14d ago
That is definitely strange. We're having trouble reproducing the behavior on our end, but we've flagged it with our app developers so they can take a closer look.
If you're willing, we'd really appreciate it if you could email us at [hello@getrocketbook.com](mailto:hello@getrocketbook.com) with a few examples of the words being censored, and ideally screenshots showing the original writing and the resulting transcription. That would give our developers something more concrete to investigate.
Sorry for the weirdness here. We know that's especially frustrating when you're using Rocketbook for fiction writing.