On February 25, the American tech giant Apple announced that they are working on fixing a bug in the iPhone’s voice transcription feature. When users say the word “racist,” the software temporarily displays “Trump” before correcting itself.
This error occurs when iPhone users hold down the microphone button and loudly say the word “racist.”
In a statement to the media, an Apple spokesperson said, “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition models supporting Dictation and will issue a fix today.”
The spokesperson explained that the glitch occurs when users dictate words containing the consonant “r.”
According to the spokesperson, a preliminary analysis of the voice recognition model in the phone software revealed that the system sometimes displays words that sound similar before recognizing the intended word by the user.
A viral video on the social media platform TikTok highlighted this problem.
Apple’s iPhone dictation feature uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to transcribe user speech into text and automatically insert punctuation based on the dictated language.
This is not the first time Apple’s AI features have encountered issues. In January of this year, Apple temporarily disabled a feature for software beta testers on iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices that aggregated and grouped notifications due to user complaints about inaccurate information provided by the feature.
In December 2024, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) formally complained to Apple about an incorrect news headline generated by Apple’s smart summary regarding Luigi Mangione, a man accused of killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, based in Minnesota, USA.
According to the BBC, the summary falsely suggested that a BBC News article claimed Mangione committed suicide by gunshot.
The BBC stated that the notification was accurate in other summaries related to news from Syria and Korea.
Apple issued a statement in January, during the release of the latest beta software versions for systems like iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, indicating that the News & Entertainment category’s notification summary feature would be temporarily unavailable.
The day before the recent malfunction occurred, Apple announced plans to invest over $500 billion in the United States over the next four years, focusing on projects involving artificial intelligence, silicon engineering, and software development.
This commitment to the largest spending in history by Apple comes in response to impending tariffs that may affect the importation of products necessary for the company’s business operations.
In February of this year, the Trump administration imposed a 10% tariff on goods imported from China, where Apple manufactures many of its products globally. This decision was made due to the significant role played by the Chinese regime in the flow of fentanyl into the United States.
The White House also announced plans to expand the tariff agenda to include all U.S. trading partners, including India, which could impact Apple’s imports from India.
President Trump met with Apple CEO Tim Cook last week. On February 25, the President took to social media to welcome Apple’s investment announcement, attributing it to the company’s confidence in “what we (the government) are doing; if they weren’t confident, they wouldn’t invest a dime.”
“Dajiyuan Times” has reached out to Apple for further comments on these developments.
Contributions to this report were made by Naveen Athrappully.