iPhone’s Voice-to-Text Feature Briefly Swaps the Word “Racist” with “Trump”

Key Takeaways

• On Tuesday, iPhone users noticed that often when they said the word racist," it was transcribed to Trump" by the phone's voice-to-text software.
• Apple has addressed the issue and blamed it on a glitch that makes it difficult for the AI to differentiate between words containing r" and having a phonetic overlap.
• However, experts are of the opinion that a phonetic overlap between these two words is just not possible.
• Nevertheless, Apple has started fixing the issue.

iPhone users were in for a surprise on Tuesday when their phone's voice-to-text feature suddenly started swapping the word racist" with Trump" briefly before correcting it to racist again.

Although the glitch is not happening every time you say the word racist," it's still a sensitive issue given the current political tensions across the country after Trump's elections.

Apple has addressed the glitch and said that it's caused by a bug that they're working on to fix.

We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today - Apple spokesperson

Apparently, the Dictation service was facing issues distinguishing between words containing r" because of the phonetic overlap. However, the company did not elaborate on why the word racist" was always confused with Trump."

Is This Really an Honest Mistake?

While this might look like an honest mistake on the surface, speech recognition experts are of the opinion that phonetic overlap couldn't be the reason behind this swap.

Peter Bell, a professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, said that although the two words contain the letter r," they're not phonetically similar enough to confuse the AI. It's more likely that someone intentionally tweaked the underlying software to make this swap.

This comes at a time when there's already a lot of tension between Trump and Apple.

• Firstly, Trump decided to impose an additional 10% tax on all the goods imported from China. Since most of Apple's products are manufactured in China, it would be a disaster for the company.
• This is likely what prompted Apple to announce a massive $500 billion investment in the US. The tech giant plans to create new facilities and expand existing ones.

Note: Apple didn't explicitly say that the increased taxes are the reason behind its investment. However, Trump feels that given the timing, there's no other plausible explanation.

The second issue is regarding the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). After Trump came to power, he decided to dismantle all DEI initiatives and programs. However, during a recent meeting, Apple's shareholders voted against scraping off DEI at the insistence of the board members.

CEO Tim Cook said that their aim is to create an environment where everyone can deliver their best. Hence, Apple will be keeping the DEI framework. Still, considering the new legal landscape, they'll probably have to make some adjustments.

This angered Trump, who lashed out at the company and said that it should completely ditch the DEI framework instead of making adjustments.

Looks like there's enough reason for a disgruntled employee at Apple to tweak the software and make it replace the word racist" with Trump." However, in the absence of any evidence, I guess we'll have to stick to Apple's version of the events.

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