The company is responding to the controversy after some iPhone owners posted videos on social media this week to detail how the glitch works.
Apple is addressing a bug in the dictation feature found on certain iPhones. The bug causes the word “Trump” to briefly appear when a word with an R consonant, such as “racist,” is spoken.
The company is responding to the controversy after some iPhone owners posted videos on social media this week to detail how the glitch works.
Users who activated the dictation feature and uttered the word “racist” noticed “Trump” appearing in the text area momentarily before being swiftly replaced by the intended word. This issue was highlighted through various videos shared online.
In a statement to The Associated Press on Wednesday, Apple acknowledged the problem, stating, “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today.”
The company said that the speech recognition models that power the voice-to-text feature might show words with some phonetic overlap.
It also said that other words that have an “r” consonant were also erroneously triggering the bug. The Associated Press could not duplicate the problem on Wednesday, a day after it emerged.
This week the company announced a plan to invest more than $500 billion and hire 20,000 people in the United States over the next four years as well as build a new factory in Texas, amid Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on imports. Separately, Apple shareholders rebuffed an attempt to pressure the company into joining Trump’s push to scrub corporate programs designed to diversify its workforce.
