Respecting the Almighty

I found a speech bug the other day.  Speak the sentence "Thanks be to God".  Oops, we don't capitalize 'God'!  Is that disrepectful, or what?

Now say, "Thanks be to Allah".  Try saying other words for the Almighty: Jehovah, Yahweh, Krishna.  Our original training data didn't come with a lot of these words, so the system will probably misrecognize you unless you have been producing enough documents with these words to give us time to train on you.

Note that we always capitalize these other words, but not 'God'. Why?  Is that a bug?  Are we a bunch of atheists? Are we afraid of the reaction from other religions if we don't show them proper respect?

Now try this: "Thanks be to Bill Gates".  No capitalization!?!  Am I going to lose my job?

The problem is that some wordsd (like 'God', or "Bill" or "Gates") are sometimes capitalized and sometimes not. We don't know if you meant to talk about the Christian God (which should be capitalized) or an ancient Greek or Roman god (which is not capitalized).  Try it: "Zeus is a Greek god". Words like Allah and Jehovah (or for that matter, "Jesus Christ") are always upper-case, and we handle them as such.

In situations like this you can often see the problem better if you try typing your sentence into Microsoft Word, which uses (mostly) the same capitalization rules.  Word will not flag a capitalization error if it knows that there is a legitimate lower-case alternative.

Of course, we can always override this rule using a special 'tag' file that specifically marks certain words as to be always-capitalized. But we don't want too many words in that file, because it will slow performance.

So what do you think? Should we make an exception for God?