Apple fixing bug in iPhone speech-to-text glitch which interprets 'racist' as 'Trump'
The fault has been linked to people speaking "words with some phonetic overlap", according to Apple, which is rolling out an update.
Wednesday 26 February 2025 10:35, UK
Apple says it is repairing a glitch with its speech-to-text feature on iPhones which interprets the word "racist" as "Trump" before autocorrecting itself.
The US technology giant said it is working on fixing the bug which has triggered outrage from Trump supporters and conservative commentators, including Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
iPhone users have been posting videos on social media testing out the glitch.
Sky News' US partner NBC News was able to replicate the same trend on multiple iPhone devices. However, not all tests resulted in the glitch.
When activating its voice dictation feature and saying the word "racist" the text result would briefly display "Trump" before being replaced with "racist".
"We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers dictation and we are rolling out a fix today," a spokesperson for Apple said in a statement on Tuesday.
Apple explained the speech recognition models powering the feature may first display words with some phonetic overlap.
Then further analysis enables it to land on the actual word that the user intended to say.
The tech company said the bug has been incorrectly suggesting "Trump" in response to several words that include an "r" consonant.
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The White House has not yet responded to a request for comment.
This is not the first time a major technology company has been accused of political bias in recent months.
Meta has faced criticism after users on its social platforms claimed they have been made to automatically follow pages for Donald Trump and his vice president JD Vance. Meta explained this is usual practice during presidential transitions, with the accounts linked to the US offices rather than the individuals.
Meta also accepted there was an issue with Instagram search results not appearing correctly when people searched certain hashtags, including #democrat.
In September, Amazon had to fix an error when Alexa reportedly declined to comment when asked about Mr Trump, but when asked about rival candidate Kamala Harris it sometimes gave a detailed list of reasons backing her.
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