Abdelrahman
Apple has announced its efforts to address a bug that some iPhone users encountered. The issue arises within the voice-to-text feature, where saying “racist” briefly displays “Trump” before correcting itself to “racist.”
Reactions of confusion and anger surged online among conservative commentators, including Infowars host Alex Jones, after a TikTok user highlighted the issue in a viral video. Since then, many users have shared their own experiments with the glitch.
Reports from several NBC News journalists confirmed that this phenomenon could be replicated across various iPhone models. During testing with the voice dictation feature, saying “racist” momentarily displayed “Trump” before changing to “racist,” although not every attempt resulted in the glitch.
An Apple representative stated, “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are implementing a fix today.”
The White House has yet to provide a comment on the situation.
Apple indicated that the glitch is due to the speech recognition models sometimes misinterpreting phonetic sounds, leading to the incorrect initial suggestion of “Trump” before landing on the intended word. This error has presented “Trump” when users say various words containing the consonant “r.”
This incident highlights ongoing concerns about potential political bias within major technology companies.
Recently, Meta faced criticism as users accused its platforms of promoting Donald Trump and his administration after his inauguration. Users were unsettled to find they were automatically suggested to follow new social media pages for Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Meta clarified that this practice is standard during presidential transitions.
Furthermore, Meta addressed allegations regarding Instagram seemingly blocking results for the hashtag #democrat, explaining that the issue affected multiple hashtags across the platform, not just those related to the left.
In September, Amazon resolved a glitch that caused its virtual assistant Alexa to provide inconsistent responses when asked about reasons to vote for Trump versus Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
When questioned about Trump, Alexa reportedly refrained from offering information that supports a specific political party or candidate. In contrast, when asked about Harris, the assistant frequently provided detailed supporting arguments for her.
Daniel Arkin and Ben Goggin contributed.
