Apple Scrambles To Fix Dictation Tool That Transcribes ‘Racist’ As ‘Trump’

Apple says it is fixing its speech-to-text tool after some users found that their iPhones transcribed the word “racist” as “Trump.” The issue first gained attention through a viral TikTok video and has since been widely shared across social media.

“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation, and we are rolling out a fix today,” a spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday.

Was it just a glitch?

Apple suggested that the problem stemmed from the Dictation system’s difficulty distinguishing words with an “r” sound. However, some experts remain skeptical. “This smells like a serious prank,” a former Apple employee who worked on its AI assistant Siri told the New York Times.

Peter Bell, a professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, dismissed Apple’s reasoning as “just not plausible.” He told the BBC that AI models are trained on extensive speech datasets and should not confuse “racist” and “Trump” due to phonetic similarity alone. He said it was more likely that someone had modified the underlying software.

Bad Timing for Apple

The controversy comes as Apple strengthens its ties with the US government. On Monday, the company announced a $500 billion investment in the US over the next four years, including the construction of a massive artificial intelligence server factory in Texas. Many industry analysts view this move as a strategic effort to align with former President Donald Trump’s administration, which had previously threatened tariffs on Apple products manufactured in China.

According to The Guardian, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly met with Trump just days before the investment announcement. The tech giant had previously secured exemptions from some of Trump’s tariffs, helping it avoid price hikes on key products.

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