Apple has responded after a bug in its voice-to-text feature on iPhone caused a mix-up that triggered a row. The company confirmed the glitch, which makes the feature write US President Donald Trump's name when a user says the word ‘racist’.
In an emailed statement, Apple said it is currently working on a solution. The glitch went viral as several social media users shared videos pointing out the peculiarity.
According to Apple, the glitch happens because the speech recognition models powering the feature can sometimes display words with phonetic overlap until further analysis from the model can be conducted and the correct word displayed, TweakTown reported.
Apple says the bug has been suggesting “Trump” in replacement of several other words beginning with the “r” consonant.
“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fox today,” an Apple spokesperson told Deadline.
One of the users who pointed out the issue on X said, “Ok, so this is real. But not everytime. It did the first time, then intermittently. So I recorded it…Racist briefly shows Trump before switching. Strange.”
Another user said, “Holy s**t, it's real! Apple iPhones replace the word ‘racist' with ‘Trump’ when using the dictation feature. Apple claims it's working to fix this ‘bug’."
{{/usCountry}}Another user said, “Holy s**t, it's real! Apple iPhones replace the word ‘racist' with ‘Trump’ when using the dictation feature. Apple claims it's working to fix this ‘bug’."
{{/usCountry}}The glitch was prevalent across multiple iPhones. According to TweakTown, the glitch may likely be persisting in the latest version of iOS, which is iOS 18. The publication said the issue may be location-based as an iPhone 15 Pro Max running on iOS 18.3.1 outside of US did not display ‘Trump’ before writing the word ‘racist’. It is also possible that a fix has already been rolled out.
Several Trump supporters blamed the company of having a political bias. This comes days after Apple said it would invest $500 billion in the US over the next four years.