Ask HN: Has autocorect ever landed in an HR meeting? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has autocorect ever landed in an HR meeting?

1 pointmikece6 comments

We all know the frustration of auto-correct incorrectly guessing what you meant when typing a word that's not in the dictionary. A coworker of mine actually got in hot water after his Android phone auto-corrected "nuget" to the (racial) n-word. I would have thought autocorrecting to THAT word would have been a hard-coded "don't ever do this!" situation, but apparently not.

By demonstrating that the phone misinterpreted a word not in its dictionary and that the context of the conversation was about a .NET application the matter was dismissed but I would have thought certain words wouldn't be suggested unless the user overrode the override to put in the offensive word.

Doesn't anyone review their work before presenting it?

There is no way this should have gotten past your co-workers eye if they put any amount of diligence into their writing. I would give them a warning, because it is a red flag that the rest of their work is probably one-shot without review as well. It's just plain sloppy and unacceptable even if the word wasn't a derogatory one.

Imagine if this was in front of a customer. The entire company's credibility would be in question, and possibly lawsuits would fly. So I'm prone to taking a hard stance on this one.

In my experience android auto correct only corrects towards more offensive words when you use that offensive word often.

It would be interesting test for your friend to delete the auto correct learning history and then try and replicate. Because mine tries to correct to "nugget".

This person isn't one who ever uses that word.

I am the friend in question. I can tell you this much:

1) I definitely don't use that word often. To my recollection, I've never typed it into my phone at all, ever.

2) I had this reoccur with the phone that replaced it.

3) I explicitly deleted it from the keyboard dictionary both times, so this is not a case of my usage data following me to my new phone.

*autocorrect

Touché.

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