Apple Addresses iPhone Speech-to-Text Error That Misinterprets ‘Racist’ as ‘Trump’ | Science, Climate & Tech News
Apple has announced that it is addressing a bug within its speech-to-text functionality on iPhones, which inaccurately converts the term “racist” to “Trump” before it corrects itself.
The US technology giant stated that it is actively working to resolve the bug, which has incited backlash from Trump supporters and conservative commentators, including Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
iPhone users have been sharing videos on social media to demonstrate the glitch.
Sky News’ US affiliate, NBC News, successfully replicated the same behavior on several iPhone devices; however, not every attempt yielded the glitch.
When using the voice dictation feature and stating “racist,” the output briefly showed “Trump” before ultimately correcting to “racist.”
“We are aware of a problem with the speech recognition model that drives dictation and are rolling out a fix today,” an Apple spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday.
Apple clarified that the speech recognition models might initially present words with some phonetic similarities.
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Subsequent analysis allows it to accurately identify the word the user intended to say.
The tech firm indicated that the bug has been incorrectly suggesting “Trump” in response to numerous words containing the “r” sound.
More from Sky News:
Ukraine finalizes Trump’s minerals agreement
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The White House has yet to issue a response to the inquiry.
This incident is not the first occasion where a significant tech company has faced allegations of political bias in recent months.
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Meta has come under fire after users reported that they were automatically following pages related to Donald Trump and his vice president JD Vance. Meta clarified that this is a standard procedure during presidential transitions and that the accounts are connected to US offices rather than the individuals themselves.
Meta also acknowledged there were issues with Instagram search results not displaying correctly when users searched for specific hashtags, including #democrat.
In September, Amazon had to amend an error when Alexa reportedly refused to comment on Mr. Trump but offered a detailed list of reasons supporting rival candidate Kamala Harris when asked.
