A man holds an Apple iPhone as he walks on a street in New York, U.S., August 1, 2018.
Lucas Jackson | Reuters
Apple said it is working on repairing a glitch after some iPhone users noticed that speaking the word “racist” into the voice-to-text feature causes it to write “Trump” before quickly switching to “racist.”
Confusion and outrage from conservative commentators, including Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, grew online after a TikTok user called out the feature in a video posted last week. Others on social media have since filmed themselves testing out the glitch.
Several NBC News reporters were able to replicate the same trend on multiple iPhone devices. When activating its voice dictation feature and saying the word “racist,” the text result would briefly display “Trump” before being replaced with “racist.” However, not all tests resulted in the glitch.
“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 Tuesday.
A spokesperson for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Apple said that sometimes, the speech recognition models powering the feature may first display words with some phonetic overlap until further analysis enables it to land on the actual word that the user intended to say. The tech company said that the bug has been erroneously suggesting “Trump” in response to several words that include an “r” consonant.
The Apple glitch is the latest instance of a major technology company being accused of political bias.
Last month, Meta faced backlash over users claiming that its social platforms boosted President Donald Trump and his administration after his inauguration. Users expressed alarm after noticing they had seemingly been made to automatically follow Trump’s and Vice President JD Vance’s new pages. Meta, however, said that this was part of the company’s usual practice during presidential transitions.
Meta also addressed complaints about Instagram appearing to block results when searching the hashtag #democrat, claiming it was an issue affecting “a number of different hashtags on Instagram — not just those on the left.”
In September, Amazon said it fixed an error that caused its virtual assistant Alexa to give differing answers when asked to provide reasons to vote for Trump versus Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
When asked about Trump, Alexa reportedly declined to “provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate.” But when asked about Harris, the assistant at times gave a detailed list of reasons backing the candidate.
