Apple to fix a voice dictation bug that substitutes ‘Trump’ for ‘racist’

Apple has acknowledged a bug in its voice dictation feature that sometimes types “Trump” when an iPhone user says the word “racist.” The glitch in the feature was first highlighted in a viral TikTok post. After the video went viral, many iPhone owners started sharing their own experiences with the voice-to-text tool bug on social media platforms.

Apple has promised to fix the bug in the automatic dictation tool with the words “racist” and “Trump”

After the reports regarding the bug, Apple provided a statement to The New York Times and Fox News. “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers dictation, and we are rolling out a fix as soon as possible,” an Apple spokesperson said to the aforementioned publications. The issue appeared to begin soon after Apple released an update to its servers. It’s worth mentioning that some online videos demonstrate that the bug doesn’t appear every time someone says the word “racist.”

It appears that the issue in the voice dictation tool of Apple devices boils down to phonetic overlap between the words “Trump” and “racist”. The company stated that other words with an “r” consonant occasionally experience similar bugs in the automatic dictation tool. However, John Burkey, who formerly worked on the Siri team at Apple, told the Times that someone internally could have carried out a serious prank involving the US President’s name appearing after saying the word “racist” while using the automatic dictation tool.

The glitch caused outrage among many Trump supporters

The bug in Apple’s speech-to-text tool has caused outrage among thousands of Trump supporters and conservative commentators in the US. It is not the first time that features of the Apple devices have been in trouble. In 2018, Apple’s Siri voice assistant was the center of a political controversy when it displayed a nude image in response to the question: “Who is Donald Trump?”

However, some Wikipedia editors caused this issue. They had changed the source of information of Apple’s assistant. Notably, the awkward glitch appeared a few days after Apple announced plans to invest more than $500 billion in the US over the next four years as Trump’s tariffs loom.