Apple iPhone voice dictation error turns word 'racist' into 'Trump'

It's a surprising mistake, spotted by Internet users. On Tuesday, American owners of iPhones, Apple's smartphone, shared screenshots and recordings of the phone's voice dictation , showing that when pronouncing the word "racist" , their phone automatically transcribed the name "Trump" for a few seconds, before correcting itself.

The incident sparked a wave of reactions, leading to questions about the reliability of Apple's artificial intelligence. Images and videos of users facing this bug have gone viral on social networks, including TikTok.

Faced with the controversy, an Apple spokeswoman explained that this problem would be linked to a "phonetic overlap" between the two words, specifying that the company was already working to correct the bug. The problem would be accidental and not intentional, she specified to the New York Times . The origin of the bug would go back to a recent update of Apple's servers, as stated by John Burkey, founder of Wonderrush.ai, an artificial intelligence start-up, and former member of Apple's Siri team. The latter nevertheless wonders about another possibility: "This smells like a serious joke. The only question is: did someone slip this into the data or into the code?" A hypothesis on which the firm did not comment.

This is not the first time that Apple has faced a problem of this type. In 2018, the voice assistant Siri had already created controversy. Faced with the question "Who is Donald Trump?" , the voice assistant responded with an image of a penis. And this, because editors had made fraudulent modifications to Wikipedia, the tool's main source. Seven years later, this new bug appears as Apple announced a massive investment of 500 billion dollars in the United States over the next four years, in a context where Donald Trump has continued to call for the relocation of American industries since taking office.