LONDON: Apple is fixing a bug within the dictation feature on some iPhones that briefly suggests the word “Trump” when a word with an R consonant is spoken, including “racist”.
The company is responding to the controversy after some iPhone owners posted videos on social media this week to detail how the glitch works.
When users activated the dictation feature and said the word “racist”, the word “Trump” appears in the text window before quickly being replaced by the correct word, according to various videos posted online.
“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” Apple said in a statement sent to The Associated Press on Wednesday (Feb 26).
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 US$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.