Apple has promised to fix a bug in its iPhone automatic dictation tool after some users reported it had suggested to them “Trump” when they said the word “racist”.
The glitch was first highlighted in a viral post on TikTok, when the speech-to-text tool sometimes briefly flashed up the word “Trump” when they said “racist”, and was later repeated by others on social media.
“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers dictation and we are rolling out a fix,” an Apple spokesperson said.
The company blamed the bug on its tool displaying words that have “phonetic overlap” before the “intended word” is identified, which in this case included words with the “r” consonant.
However, the glitch caused outrage among some conservative commentators in the US, who have long accused big tech companies of political bias against those on the right.
The bug also called into question Apple’s artificial intelligence capabilities, only a day after the company announced a $500bn (£395bn) investment in the US, widely interpreted as a move designed to appeal to Donald Trump’s government.
The tech company said on Monday that the investment, running over the next four years, would include a giant factory in Texas for artificial intelligence servers and would create about 20,000 research and development jobs across the country.
The AI announcement came only days after Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, reportedly met Trump. The company could face 10% tariffs on its devices, many of which are assembled in China before being imported into the US.
The maker of the iPhone did manage to secure some waivers on tariffs levied on China during Trump’s first term.
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It is not the first time Apple has announced a multibillion-dollar investment in the US economy during a Trump administration. In 2018, during his first term in the White House, Apple said that new and ongoing investments would contribute $350bn to the US economy over five years.
Since Trump’s election and his signing of a slew of executive orders overturning diversity, equity and inclusion measures in the federal government, many in the tech sector have followed suit with a rollback of similar schemes – including Google, Amazon and Meta. However, on Tuesday Apple shareholders voted down a proposal urging the company to drop its own DEI programmes.
