Apple says it is working to fix its speech-to-text tool after social media users discovered that when they spoke the word “racist” into their iPhones, it was transcribed as “Trump.”
The tech giant suggested the issue with its Dictation service stemmed from a problem in distinguishing words containing an “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.
However, a speech recognition expert told the BBC that this explanation was “just not plausible.”
Peter Bell, professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, said it was more likely that someone had altered the underlying software used by the tool.
Videos shared online show people speaking the word “racist” into the Dictation tool. While it is sometimes transcribed correctly, in other instances, it appears as “Trump” before being quickly corrected.
The BBC has not been able to replicate the mistake, suggesting Apple’s fix may already be taking effect.
Prof. Bell dismissed Apple’s explanation of phonetic overlap, stating that the words were not similar enough for an AI system to confuse them.
Speech-to-text recognition models are trained using audio clips paired with accurate transcripts. They are also designed to understand words in context—for example, distinguishing between “cup” and “cut” in the phrase “a cup of tea.”
Prof. Bell argued that this was unlikely to be a simple data error, as Apple’s English language model would have been trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech, ensuring a high level of accuracy.
For “less well-resourced languages,” AI training issues could arise, he noted. But in this case, he said, “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.”
Last month, Apple had to roll back another AI-powered feature following complaints from the BBC and other news organisations.
It suspended its AI-generated news summaries after displaying false notifications, including one that incorrectly stated tennis player Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.
Yesterday, Apple announced plans to invest $500bn (£395bn) in the U.S. over the next four years, including a large data center in Texas to support Apple Intelligence.
The company’s chief executive, Tim Cook, also said Apple may need to revise its policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) following former President Donald Trump’s calls to end DEI programs.
Source: BBC
