Is autocorrect racist? The push to stamp out 'galling' ethnic name bias on phones and computers

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Having your name mangled by autocorrect when you type it into your phone or computer can be frustrating and time consuming.

Whenever Sydney dental student Halla writes her name into her phone, it assumes there's a typo and suggests either "Hail" or "Halal".

The campaigners have written to tech giants, including Microsoft and Apple, and provided them with a spreadsheet of names they want embedded in their dictionaries.

In the open letter, the campaigners say 41 per cent of the names given to babies in England and Wales are considered "incorrect" by Microsoft's English UK dictionary.

Microsoft has recently changed some of its language to make it more gender-neutral, using terms such as "humanity" rather than "mankind", and "workforce" rather than "manpower".

Dr Badami said there were valuable tools such as the Australian Digital Inclusion Index to measure how different people interacted with technology.

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3 comments

- It is racism - an unthinking one, but still so.
  Where did those dictionaries come from? Why were they chosen? Not every act of racial bias involves a burning cross or a nazi.
  With an english speaking AI it's gonna be based on a library of shitposters and snarkers - and yeah, they're gonna overstep a lot of lines and they're gonna have bias, conscious or otherwise. And the two sources you cite are overwhelmingly white male.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Having your name mangled by autocorrect when you type it into your phone or computer can be frustrating and time consuming.
Whenever Sydney dental student Halla writes her name into her phone, it assumes there's a typo and suggests either "Hail" or "Halal".
The campaigners have written to tech giants, including Microsoft and Apple, and provided them with a spreadsheet of names they want embedded in their dictionaries.
In the open letter, the campaigners say 41 per cent of the names given to babies in England and Wales are considered "incorrect" by Microsoft's English UK dictionary.
Microsoft has recently changed some of its language to make it more gender-neutral, using terms such as "humanity" rather than "mankind", and "workforce" rather than "manpower".
Dr Badami said there were valuable tools such as the Australian Digital Inclusion Index to measure how different people interacted with technology.
The original article contains 560 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Bollocks.