Apple Says It’s Fixing Transcription Glitch That Transcribes ‘Racist’ as ‘Trump’
Apple says it will release software fixes for unusual and out of date transcription issues Various Tiktok video. 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”. this New York Times report It is able to copy the problem 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 someone worked in Apple’s software Maybe intentionally programmed in a failure.
Read more: Activision confirms that Call of Duty has AI-generated visual effects
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 current technological limitations and the biased challenge inherent 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 is only as clever as trained data,” said Scott Stephenson, founder and CEO of Deepgram, an AI platform where Deepgram works in the API.
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 message came out the same week as Apple, the world’s largest tech company, announced Investing $500 million in the United States Includes funding for Apple TV plus content creation and about 20,000 new jobs. Tim Cook, CEO of the company Meet with President Donald Trump last week.
