Apple is fixing a bug that caused its voice-to-text dictation software to mistakenly transcribe the word “racist” as “Trump,” the company said on Wednesday.
The glitch, which was called out by users on TikTok and other social media platforms, occurred for certain words that include the “R” consonant.
When users activated the transcription feature and said the word “racist,” the word “Trump” would briefly appear before it displayed the correct word.
“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” Apple said in a statement.
The company said that its voice-to-text software will, at times, briefly display words that have phonetic overlap before self-correcting.
Some Trump supporters expressed outrage over Apple’s software bug.
“Whoever at Apple is responsible for this should lose their job. The voice-to-text feature is displaying “Trump” whenever I say “racist,’” X user @MalachiMaxeyUSA said.
“When you say the word “racist” to iPhone’s Siri, the speech-to-text feature periodically changes what you said to “Trump.” @Apple, you got some ‘splainin’ to do,” said @ErrolWebber.
The issue arose just two days after Apple committed to investing $500 billion toward the US economy and hiring 20,000 new employees. Trump praised the move, stating that it should Apple and its CEO Tim Cook had “faith in what we are doing.”
However, Trump also blasted Apple after its shareholders rejected a proposal to eliminate DEI programs, writing in a Truth Social post that the initiatives are “very bad for our country.”
With Post wires
