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The Internet Technology

People With Commonly Autocorrected Names Call For Tech Firms To Fix Problem (theguardian.com) 103

Posted by BeauHD from the Anuff-is-enough dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People whose names get mangled by autocorrect have urged technology companies to fix the problem faster, with one person whose name gets switched to "Satan" saying: "I am tired of it." People with Irish, Indian and Welsh names are among those calling for improvements to the systems that operate on phones and computers as part of the "I am not a typo" campaign. "It is important that technology becomes more inclusive," said Savan-Chandni Gandecha, 34, a British Indian content creator whose name, which means monsoon moonlight, has been autocorrected to Satan. "My name has also been corrected to Savant," he said. "It is sometimes corrected to Savan, or the hyphen is not accepted by online forms and that irks me," he said. "Even in India my name gets corrected to "Sawan", and it's not just an English issue. It's a multi-language thing."

The campaign has estimated that four out of 10 names of babies born in England and Wales in 2021 were deemed "wrong" or "not accepted" when tested on Microsoft's English dictionary. Dhruti Shah, a journalist, has backed the campaign after seeing her name autocorrected to "Dirty" and "Dorito". She said: "My first name isn't even that long -- only six characters -- but yet when it comes up as an error or it's mangled and considered an unknown entity, it's like saying that it's not just your name that's wrong, but you are." The campaign group -- established by a group of people working in the creative industries in London -- wrote an open letter to technology companies, which pointed out that between 2017 and 2021, 2,328 people named Esmae were born, compared with 36 Nigels. Esmae gets autocorrected to Admar, while Nigel is unchanged. "There are so many diverse names in the global majority but autocorrect is western- and white-focused," said Gandecha. Rashmi Dyal-Chand, a professor at Northeastern University in the US whose name is sometimes corrected to Sashimi, is supporting the latest campaign and said: "For people with names like mine, autocorrect is not convenient and helpful. It is unhelpful. And yes -- it is harmful."

"We all increasingly rely on smartphones, tablets, word processors, and apps that use autocorrect. Yet autocorrect incorporates a set of defaults -- including dictionaries -- that help some of its users to communicate seamlessly at the expense of others who cannot."

Karen Fox, whose children are called Eoin and Niamh, said of autocorrect: "The red line bothers me -- I didn't choose the 'wrong' name for my child. Tech companies update dictionaries with slang all the time and I think it should be an easy thing to do and definitely a priority."
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People With Commonly Autocorrected Names Call For Tech Firms To Fix Problem More

People With Commonly Autocorrected Names Call For Tech Firms To Fix Problem

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  • The feature already exists, add their name to your local spell check library. It's been like this for decades. My last name gets the red "misspelled" line too, never bothered me, but I'm not a snowflake.

    • Re:Edgelord makes a lot of assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Knightman ( 142928 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @05:26PM (#64492005)

      Can you add your name to the local spell check library for every device or web-form you have no control of?

      Didn't think so.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 )

        I don't want my dictionaries cluttered with every name in the Universe just because someone is "tired" of the fact that his name is close to some word in another language. I'm perfectly capable of handling the autocorrect changing the occasional "Saddam" to "serum", and I definitely don't want to see "Dhruti" pop up instead of "dirty" when I misspell the latter as "drity" on the train.

      • The issue is HER PHONE, that is what's flagging the misspelling/substitution, not the applications she access thru her phone, but you knew that, right?

        Do you really imagine every application/website has its own spellcheck for all user-enteral fields? Really?

        • I'll just quote something from the Guardian article since it's obvious you didn't actually read the ./ article or the one in The Guardian:

          "We all increasingly rely on smartphones, tablets, word processors, and apps that use autocorrect. Yet autocorrect incorporates a set of defaults â" including dictionaries â" that help some of its users to communicate seamlessly at the expense of others who cannot."

          TL;DR: You piled on more assumptions about what you believe the issue is and how people use techno

          • Yawn. It's still her phone. The spell-checker on her phone can be easily taught to learn her name. If the spell-checker knows it is spelled right, it will not get auto-corrected. If her friends have that problem, same solution. I certainly don't think words I misspelled should be auto-corrected to her name just because she's too lazy/dumb to teach her phone her name. Come to think of it - don't most built-in spell-checkers automatically learn the names of people in the contacts (to many people's annoyance)?

            • Yawn. It's still her phone

              Which her are you referring to? There were 3 people mentioned in the article: Savan-Chandni Gandecha, Dhruti Shah or Rashmi Dyal-Chand who happens to be a man. Go back and read the article again, plus phones was just one of several devices or technologies mentioned.

              The spell-checker on her phone can be easily taught to learn her name.

              What about someone else who needs to take down a name? Are they even allowed to add words to the dictionary on a company-computer? If the latter sounds dumb, you'd be surprised how stupid some of the IT-policies some corporations enforce.

              • Each of them can train their own spell checker, Karen. And they can fucking tell the IT department they lost the company business because they couldn't write down a name. And then the IT department will ask them "And you couldn't find pen and paper to jot that down? The company provides that for each employee. You took them all home, didn't you, Mrs. Satan."

                • Karen huh? Seems you didn't like that I pointed out your flawed assumptions so you had to resort to name-calling. How very immature.

                  I'll also note that you don't know what a "Karen" is.

          • The Guardian appears bereft of competent editors (thought... do the same people own them as own /. ? hmm...)

            We all increasingly rely on smartphones, tablets, word processors, and apps that use autocorrect.

            No, "we all" don't. That's one of the first things I turn off in system prefs of whatever device/software — computer, phone, pad, word processor, etc. I leave it off. Predictive suggestions are fine; that can be a timesaver. Altering what I typed... no thanks.

            I'm not the only one on the planet's surf

            • No, "we all" don't.

              So you don't use "smartphones, tablets, word processors, and apps" at all?

              Interesting.

              Oh, you thought "we all" referred to using autocorrect on those devices? It didn't, it referred to relying on devices that have autocorrect - there is a distinction there. Plus, "we all" was used colloquiality in the sense that everyone who live and work in modern society uses an electronic device. Context matters.

              I'm not the only one on the planet's surface who sports better than rudimentary spelling skills and can hit the keys (virtual or otherwise) I aim at. Most of the time, anyway. Plus, there's that whole "read before you publish" process.

              Sure, but the thing is that not everyone is like you or in your situation. If you judge the world and people o

      • How hard would it be to just turn off auto-correct when you capitalize the first letter?

        • Tody is Thirsday, tomorrow is Fruday Ii believe. Haev you ever been to the Gloden Gvate Beidge? Did you know that the chief engineer during the construction of that bridge was Nr Josepj Straiss? Anther fact about the bridge is that in 1983 the FBO foiled a plot to kill Ween Elsbeth IiI by dropping an object on onto her royal yacht when it passed underneath the bridge. Suonds very plebian considering how people was assassinated during the Niddle Agesss.

          Sometimes simple ideas work, other times they don't. The

      • Okay, why would a web-form even have its own spellchecker, let alone an auto-correct? Even if you thought you should check for (common) misspellings of names, at least have a fucking check box for "yeah, that is how my name is spelled". Sue the operator of that site for being stupid if they just change it, especially if it's the government.

        BTW, if you try to find misspelled names, why would you think Satan is a proper name?

    • Re:Karen needs to learn to use her technology (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @05:32PM (#64492033)

      Disagree. For a long time it was commonly accepted wisdom that you do not run spellcheck on names. Ie, words that are capitalized. Because it is impossible for a spellchecker to know how to spell a proper name. Is it Karen, Karin, Karren, Karyn, Caryn, Charon, or...? Spellcheckers (ie, last couple of years) make absolutely STUPID mistakes, trying to convert Indian names to a similar European spelling or other idiocy. Whereas go back a few more years and no spellcheckers ever bothered to attempt the impossible task.

      It should never by my responsibility to add the contents of the corporate directory into the spell check as names to ignore. I don't know in advance what names I might type into an email or document. And I should not have to know this in advance. Modern spell checkers do NOT ask if their spelling is correct, they just go ahead and change the word, which is sometimes difficult to notice.

      The rules are simple, no need for AI: 1) if a word has a capital letter or a number in it, then don't attempt to spellcheck it. 2) If in doubt, don't change what I typed, because you the developer of the spellchecker do not know more than I do what I meant to do. 3) If you want to spellcheck more aggressively, then this should be opt-in by the user and not the default setting.

      • Re: Karen needs to learn to use her technology (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Malc ( 1751 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @05:53PM (#64492095)

        Sometimes modern spell checkers change the word after youâ(TM)ve entered the next word or two in the sentence, so youâ(TM)re not even looking at it to notice it changed. I have to proof read a lot more than a used to.

      • Never mind if you're a polyglot, with polyglot friends, mixing multiple languages within one piece of text. Autocorrect makes writing anything a real bane...

      • Disagree. For a long time it was commonly accepted wisdom that you do not run spellcheck on names. Ie, words that are capitalized. Because it is impossible for a spellchecker to know how to spell a proper name.

        Yeah, sorry, but that doesn't work in languages like German, where all proper nouns are capitalized. Let alone for people who chose to not capitalize their name - and probably also complain that their names get tagged by spellcheckers.

        • True, but spellcheckers are not universal. I'm referring to English versions of wordprocessors and such, like Word, which had a very specific configuration (on by default) to ignore capitalized words. I don't know what the German version of Word did, but it doesn't invalidate my point that things were working just find until relatively recently when some software and devices became aggressive in their spellchecks. There were even rumors that on iphones there were "forbidden" words that were extremely dif

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      The red squiggly underlines in word processing software and the like, are fine. That's not what we're talking about. Users can look at a proper noun with red squgglies under it and go "Oh, haha, La-a's name isn't in the spelling dictionary, gosh, I wonder why not", and there's no need to do anything about that, because you know what's going on and nothing has _happened_ other than alerting you to the non-dictionary-word nature of the name (which you were likely already aware of). That's fine.

      What we're t

  • Poor little Bobby Tables (Score:4, Funny)

    by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @05:22PM (#64491995) Homepage Journal

    Yeah little Bobby Tables has been having that problem for years.

  • Sorry about that, Santa (Score:3)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @05:34PM (#64492043)

    Do I still get a Christmas present?

    • No, Satan has put a burning piece of coal in your stocking. Meanwhile the cult of Santa worshippers is biting heads off of peeps.

  • Cabbage (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jerrry ( 43027 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @05:37PM (#64492047)

    âoeBabbage never foresaw the terrible consequences of his invention, a machine that would autocorrect his name to cabbage, every single time.ââ"Philomena Cunk

  • A priest, a minister and ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @05:38PM (#64492051)

    ... a rabbit walk in to a bar.

  • If you use capitalization the spell checker is supposed to assume you know what you are typing even if Capitalication is completely wrong the word should not be assumed to be incorrect. But alas Capitalication is flagged as misspelled - but the auto correct should not be auto correcting capitalized names used as a noun without direct interaction - but then we are into grammar auto correction at that point. Wait what were we talking about?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I think this was a recent change with apple.

      Not long ago, an uppercase word would still show autocorrect suggestions but you had to tap one, unlike lowercase dictionary words that simply hitting space after will autocorrect if you don't tap the first entry in the suggestions (which is how you entered it)

      Just tried it and sure enough hitting space after a capitalized word autocorrects identically to normal words in lowercase.

      What BS

  • My gf's Nicaraguan-Syrian name gets stepped on by every automated system in the world.

  • Savan-Chadni has a big problem (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @05:49PM (#64492085)

    See, as a content creator, he typically works on contract - meaning he has to handle billing quite frequently. And his customers get a little bothered when they see

    "Mr. Johnson,

    The time for your reckoning is at hand.

    Satan"

    • Perhaps Satan should learn to proofread their correspondence with customers?

      Just a thought...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      See, as a content creator, he typically works on contract - meaning he has to handle billing quite frequently. And his customers get a little bothered when they see

      "Mr. Johnson,

      The time for your reckoning is at hand.

      Satan"

      "content creator" is a fancy way of saying "unemployed". A bit like actor/waiter.

  • >"It is important that technology becomes more inclusive,"

    Give me a break. So tired of this nonsense.

    *ANY* typed world could be a proper name. This has nothing to do with "inclusiveness." It is simply a fact that these applications are not magically sensing when something was meant to be a proper name and leave the word as-is. That can be difficult even for humans sometimes. Especially if the name was at the beginning of a sentence or entered as lowercase somewhere else in the sentence. Most of the

    • Is it a coincidence that those who suffer from this unintentional autocorrect in the British version of a spellchecker have names which are actually not British?

      • No, the fact that names that aren't a part of the English language do not appear in an English dictionary would be an anti-coincidence.

    • >*ANY* typed world could be a proper name"

      I find it hilarious that my mistype, above, made it into my posting. Instead, I think I should be pissed at the WORLD that my "world" word was not corrected to "word" automatically for me.

  • I feel sorry for anybody who has that problem, with the exception of those who try to put a hyphen or apostrophe in their name.

  • That name is going to be largely useless for a while.

  • This proves his genius. He saw it coming decades ago.

    • Re:Bill Gates (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DingerX ( 847589 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @11:23PM (#64492565) Journal
      He has to live with Outlook, which, like other mailing software, scans messages before they are sent for keywords such as "CV", "Resume", "Attachment", and, if it gets a hit, and there's no attachment, reminds the user "would you like to add an attachment?"
      Unlike other mailing software, that dictionary includes "Bill". Every email he types his name into generates a "would you like to add an attachment", until he either disables the feature or sets up a signature.
      Unlike other mailing software, using / will try to include a file, picking something that resembles the words typed, and by default attaching the file. On the Outlook 365 web client, not even Bill Gates can disable this feature. So, if Mr. Gates ends an email with the signature /Bill on then the helpful Web Client will find a sensitive piece of financial information and automatically attach it to the message.
      Unlike other mailing software, Outlook gets bundled into office IT packages for companies around the world, supposedly to offer a comprehensive solution for your basic business infrastructure. Businesses end up including proprietary features and locking their users into Outlook. Sure, you can tell people to set up signature blocks, but you're as likely to get 100% compliance on that as with telling people they shouldn't use tab to indent their paragraphs.

      • I was going for the Funny mod, since "bill" and "gates" are valid English words that don't fail spell check, it's unlikely the man who didn't think much of the Internet would have seen this coming, and lauding him as a genius here is generally a clue that something is up. Perhaps though I've committed a fundamental comedic error--requiring the audience to follow the same thought process, rendering the joke not funny if they fail that, or perhaps even not funny if they do since they might have to go through

  • Why is this a thing? My names (and names of family and friends) are only unrecognized exactly once because I add them to my personal dictionary. Doesn't that completely address this problem?

    Or is the complaint a feeling of disrespect from not seeing one's name recognized on everyone else's computer?

    BTW, this is not an English/Western/Christian name issue. I have a lot of friends who name their kids with either novel names or novel spellings, and those names are often also not recognized.

  • Can't stand Auto-Correct. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VanGarrett ( 1269030 ) on Wednesday May 22, 2024 @08:12PM (#64492359)

    I never understood why people leave that turned on. I type what I mean, and mean what I type. I'll have a typo here and there, and certainly I don't mind spell check, but I'm just not having my device deciding that i meant something that I didn't write. I just can't abide it. Every time I get a new device, it gets turned off, immediately.

    • Same here. The only good use of auto-assumption is turned off, especially when often using more than one language as I do.

      A manual spelling check option is better.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Because of touch keyboards on small screens.

      A lot of people use swipe typing, so they literally can't avoid using auto-correct as that's fundamental to how it works.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Because of touch keyboards on small screens.

        A lot of people use swipe typing, so they literally can't avoid using auto-correct as that's fundamental to how it works.

        Even without swipe typing auto-correct is used extensively.

        You see, the keyboard on screen doesn't correspond to the touch areas of each letter. The keyboard looks at what you've typed so far, and uses that to predict the next letter you're going to type - making the hit box for those letters much larger than the hit box of letters you're less l

  • Dhruti Shah, a journalist, has backed the campaign after seeing her name autocorrected to "Dirty" and "Dorito". She said: "My first name isn't even that long -- only six characters -- but yet when it comes up as an error or it's mangled and considered an unknown entity, it's like saying that it's not just your name that's wrong, but you are."

    If someone mis-spells your name, it doesn't mean the person with the misspelled name is "wrong"... it just doesn't. Why must she be looking for validation of herself from a freaking smartphone?

    She can add her name to the dictionary/shortcut screen, and her friends/coworkers can do the same - there is no plot afoot to "marginalize" anyone based on their name, stop pretending there is.

  • I suspect... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kenh ( 9056 )

    I suspect that the end result of this 'issue' will be the declaration that just like "being on time", "math", or "speaking proper English", we'll soon learn that Auto-correct is racist... /SMH

  • The set of all possible people names and surnames and patronymics and whatnot in all the languages of the world coincides with the sets of sounds that can be uttered by an human mouth. You can't fix autocorrect to handle that, and even if you could it would make autocorrect not functional. Your name is not special and no one is supposed to treat it specially. Add your name to your local dictionary, that's why someone took the time to implement the functionality. Or just check what you wrote before hitting "

  • Turn it off (Score:3)

    by dlarge6510 ( 10394451 ) on Thursday May 23, 2024 @02:42AM (#64492739)

    Autocorrect messes everything up. I've had it switched off since 1997.

    Instead words that are considered incorrect should be highlighted as that is the standard way to do it. And anyone who doesn’t proof read their replies etc, well it's on you.

    This is a non-problem. The only way to solve it would be to tie in to national records to get all names of everyone alive as from what I see these odd names (non British/American English) are quite obviously not in the British/American English dictionaries simply because, well, they are in other dictionaries.

    So one of these:

    1. Have a separate names dictionary of ALL in-use names on the planet. This will be hard as these odd names can have very different spellings or sequences and don’t always translate well, plus how to you handle short names etc?
    2. Just stop using autocorrect, proof read your own text. Learn to spell.
    3. Or use autocorrect and effing notice you have been autocorrected (it’s not hard, it happens right in front of the user)
    4. Or maybe do the smart UI design choice of highlighting incorrect words like every other bit of software on the planet that has existed since Word 97 or before, allowing the typist to notice that the system "thinks" there is an error and thus needs the typist to decide yes or no.

    But instead we are probably going to get some A.I. When trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, the simple solution is to adapt the peg or hole to fit. But these days we don’t get that, instead we have some guy with a sledgehammer whacking it till it squeezes in.

  • Eye halve a spelling check her,
    it came with my pea sea.
    It plane lee marks four my revue
    ms steaks eye kin knot sea.
    ...

    • There's also the joke(?) about auto-generated usernames. The first two letter from the first name, plus the first three from the last name... made impossible to change...

      ...much to the chagrin and consternation of sales representative Louis Serano and sysop Biron Tchaikovsky...

  • Harmful? (Score:3)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Thursday May 23, 2024 @06:03AM (#64492939) Journal

    Rashmi Dyal-Chand, a professor at Northeastern University in the US whose name is sometimes corrected to Sashimi, is supporting the latest campaign and said: "For people with names like mine, autocorrect is not convenient and helpful. It is unhelpful. And yes -- it is harmful."

    Fine, it's annoying ... perhaps "unfair" ... perhaps even costly, if it offends your customers, say.

    But "harmful"? That is getting really old.

    "Harmful" is just a power play. Of course if something is "harmful", you now have a moral club to enforce ... oh my, lookie there, to enforce your preferences and wishes. So that's why everything (that the cool kids don't like) has become "harmful".

  • They need to keep popping up "Ayden" and "Cayden" and "Brayden" as "nope, you spelled that wrong. Trust me, you spelled Aiden incorrectly. Also, you're not Welsh and your 3-pack of Ugg boots from Amazon are out for delivery." Don't even get me started and people that name their kids Nevaeh, which is heaven spelled backwards, so I assume they also hang all their crosses upside down.

  • You see some real bangers working phone support. (Score:3)

    by Pezbian ( 1641885 ) on Thursday May 23, 2024 @08:09AM (#64493159)

    Over 20 years ago, I took a call that looked like a prank account because the name was listed as "Shithead". It was an actual name, pronounced "SHY-theed". I took a handful of calls from guys named "Phuc". That's pronounced "Fyook".

  • Another case of a very small minority wanting the entire world to change to suit them.

  • "Waaaa waaaa waaaa! Babies need their diapers changed!"

  • This happens all the time. Yes, I know I could create a local dictionary - but I've more taken to turning off autocorrect. This is because sometimes it does the annoying thing of using an "apostrophe ess" for pluralization rather than what is correct. Thanks, I know how to spell. And if I screw it up fat fingering on the tiny phone screen virtual keypad, so be it.
  • If we've reached a point where you have to explain that “Add to Dictionary” will prevent the problem they're crying about, then we've really developed a serious incompetence issue. Should more names get added as default, yes, but in the meantime just add your name and words that get overcorrected, and stop complaining.
  • "Eoin" and "Niamh" in a western culture is close to child abuse. Those poor things have to live with these names all their lives. Just because their narcissistic mother wanted something "special" for herself.
  • if you got one of those mispelled names like SteBe and get upset that your B is correct to a V ... blame your parents

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