Apple says it is fixing transcriptional glitches, using “racists” as “Trump”
Apple said it will release software fixes to address unusual and inappropriate transcription issues displayed in multiple Tiktok videos. The problem has led some iPhones to display the word “Trump” when transcribing in voices including “racists” (racists).
An Apple spokesman said the company was aware of the problem, which was attributed to the issue of the pronunciation model and said, “We are solving the problem.” Apple said “voice overlap”, and words that include consonant r triggered the error.
In our own informal tests, CNET was not able to get iOS version 18.1.1 to display the word “Trump” when using words like “racist”, “rhuang”, “rhythm”, “ramp”, or “rough”. The New York Times reported that it was able to replicate the issue multiple times.
Newer versions of iOS, 18.3.1 were released in early February.
The suggested words may be capitalized as the beginning of a sentence, rather than necessarily a proper name. Rather than quoting the president’s last name, using “Trump” might be a reference for words that beat or gain an advantage.
A former Apple employee speculated to Times that people working on Apple’s software might intentionally program in glitches.
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But Haibing Lu, an associate professor who left the business school at Santa Clara University, believes that embarrassing mistakes may be just a mistake.
“The speech-to-text system depends on the probabilistic language models that predict words based on sound patterns and context,” Lu said in an email to CNET. “When audio clarity or words sound too similar, the system may temporarily choose a weird option before trying to correct automatically.”
This unfortunately is the challenge of current technological limitations and inherent biases in large language models, Lu said.
Another expert pointed out that AI has its limitations, and such errors can erode trust in still new technologies.
“AI only has trained data as smart as trained data,” Scott Stephenson, founder and CEO of Deepgram, works in the API for text-to-voice APIs.
Stephenson said the error had more evidence that “voice recognition should be about understanding rather than assumptions,” noting that “the goal is not just accuracy, it is also trust.”
Apple has not yet said exactly when the fix will be released.
The error came in the same week, with Apple, the world’s largest tech company, announcing a $500 million investment in the U.S., including funding for Apple TV Plus Content Creation and about 20,000 new jobs. The company’s CEO Tim Cook met with President Donald Trump last week.
