Apple says it is working to resolve an issue with its speech-to-text tool after reports emerged of iPhones transcribing the word “racist” as “Trump.”
This comes after their speech-to-text tool on iPhones has been mistakenly transcribing the word “racist” as “Trump” before correcting itself. This glitch has caused outrage among Trump supporters and conservative commentators, leading to widespread criticism.
The tech giant suggested that the error in its Dictation service may stem from a difficulty in distinguishing words containing the letter “r.”
“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” an Apple spokesperson said.
A speech recognition expert has cast doubt on Apple’s explanation for the AI transcription error, calling it “just not plausible.”
Peter Bell, a professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, suggested that the issue was more likely caused by a deliberate change to the software rather than a simple phonetic mistake.
Videos circulating online show instances where Apple’s Dictation tool incorrectly transcribes the word “racist” as “Trump” before quickly correcting itself. However, in some cases, the word is transcribed accurately from the start.
The BBC has not been able to replicate the error, indicating that Apple may have already implemented a fix.
Prof. Bell challenged Apple’s claim that phonetic similarities caused the mistake, arguing that the words “racist” and “Trump” are not alike enough to confuse an AI system. He explained that speech-to-text models are trained using real speech recordings paired with accurate transcripts, making such an error unlikely.
They are also taught to understand words in context – for example, they could distinguish the word “cup” from “cut” if it was within the phrase “a cup of tea”.
Prof Bell says the situation with Apple is unlikely to be a genuine mistake with its data because its English language model would be trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech, which should give it a high level of accuracy.
For “less well-resourced languages” he said it could be an AI training issue.
But he said in this case: “it probably points to somebody that’s got access to the process.”
A former Apple employee who worked on its AI assistant Siri told the New York Times: “This smells like a serious prank.”
Apple recently backtracked on an AI-powered feature following complaints from the BBC and other news organizations. The company suspended its AI-generated news summaries after the tool displayed inaccurate notifications, including a false claim that tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.
In a separate announcement, Apple revealed plans to invest $500 billion (£395 billion) in the U.S. over the next four years. The investment will include the development of a major data center in Texas to support Apple Intelligence, the company’s AI-driven technology.
Meanwhile, CEO Tim Cook indicated that Apple might reconsider its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies following calls from President Donald Trump to eliminate such programs.