People whose names are mangled by autocorrect have urged tech companies to fix the problem faster, with one person whose name is changed to “Satan” saying: “I’m tired of this.”
People with Irish, Indian and Welsh names are among those calling for improvements to the systems that work on phones and computers as part of the “I’m not a typo” campaign.
“It’s important for technology to be more inclusive,” said Savan-Chandni Gandecha, 34, an Indian-British content creator whose name, which means monsoon moonlight, has been autocorrected to Satan.
“My name has also been corrected to Savant,” they said. “Sometimes Savan gets corrected, or the script doesn’t get accepted in the online forms and that bothers me.
“Even in India my name is corrected to ‘Sawan’, and it’s not just an English thing. It is something multilingual.”
The campaign estimated that four in 10 baby names born in England and Wales in 2021 were deemed “incorrect” or “unaccepted” when tested in Microsoft’s English dictionary.
Dhruti Shah, a journalist, endorsed the campaign after seeing her name autocorrected to “Dirty” and “Dorito.”
She said: “My name isn’t even that long – only six characters – but still, when it appears as a mistake or is mangled and is considered an unknown entity, it’s like saying that it’s not just your name that’s wrong, but also you. are.”
The campaign group, set up by a group of people working in the creative industries in London, wrote an open letter to technology companies, noting that between 2017 and 2021, 2,328 people named Esmae were born, compared to 36 Nigels. Esmae self-corrects Admar, while Nigel doesn’t change.
“There are so many diverse names in the global majority, but autocorrect focuses on Westerners and whites,” Gandecha said.
Facebook and Microsoft have been contacted for comment.
Microsoft previously released an inclusion spell checker in its Office 365 software, which can be enabled to prompt the user, for example, to change “director” to “principal,” “teacher” to “expert,” and “labor” to “labour”. .
Last year, the nonprofit People Like Us ran an advertising campaign highlighting self-correction bias in favor of British heritage and linked the issue to the ethnic pay gap.
Rashmi Dyal-Chand, a professor at Northeastern University in the United States whose name is sometimes corrected to Sashimi, supports the latest campaign, saying: “For people with names like mine, autocorrect is neither convenient nor helpful. It’s useless. And yes, it is harmful.”
His research on the racial bias of autocorrect concluded: “We are all increasingly reliant on smartphones, tablets, word processors and apps that use autocorrect. However, autocorrect incorporates a set of default values (including dictionaries) that help some of its users communicate smoothly at the expense of others who cannot.”
Karen Fox, whose children are called Eoin and Niamh, said of the autocorrect: “The red line bothers me – I didn’t choose the ‘wrong’ name for my son. “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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Common girl names for boys born in 2021 that tend to self-correct:
Dua (which changes to Day)
Mirha (moths)
Liyana (Libyans)
Common Boy Names That Baffle Software:
Rafe (rage)
Mylo (Mull)
Eesa (reds)
