Apple’s voice-to-text feature has been demonstrated to first transcribe the word ‘racist’ as ‘Trump’ before quickly correcting itself to the proper text. The strange phenomenon was first captured on camera and shared publicly by Alex Jones’ staff.
Jones does not have the greatest reputation in news media, so it is important to note that Fox News Digital’s staff also covered the story, and claim they were able to replicate the incident on their own devices.
The original video by Alex Jones was published on X on Tuesday, 25 February, and has garnered 7.6 million views and 75,000 likes since. In it, a female staffer activates the voice note feature on her Apple iPhone, then clearly says the word ‘racist’. The phone, however, first puts the word ‘Trump’ as the transcription in the message box, before correcting it to ‘racist’.
A second iPhone of a male staffer was also brought into the experiment. According to the staffer’s testimony in the video, he only got the strange ‘bug’ some portion of the time, but he too witnessed it on his own device.
An Apple spokesperson admitted to Fox News Digital that they are aware of the incident. ‘We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation, and we are rolling out a fix as soon as possible,’ the Apple rep stated in response to the controversy, as quoted by Fox.
According to the tech giant, the speech recognition models used for dictation might momentarily show incorrect words that have some phonetic similarities to the speech input before correctly identifying the intended word. Apple also notes that this issue typically impacts words containing the ‘r’ consonant during dictation.
President Trump is believed to have good relations with the CEOs of major tech companies in his second term. Alphabet Inc (Google’s parent company) Sundar Pichai, Meta (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and CEO of the company involved in this recent controversy, Apple’s Tim Cook all attended his second inauguration on 20 January in Washington, DC. Many of them also made generous donations to his inauguration fund. Not to mention X owner Elon Musk, who is one of President Trump’s closest and most influential advisers.
This issue is likely a remnant of the time of the Biden administration, when tech companies were often pressured to remove content from their platforms that is detrimental to the Democratic Party’s political causes. Between 2021 and 2022 President Trump was even banned from all major social media platforms.
A similar incident that the few media outlets that cover this story bring up is the case of Amazon’s virtual assistant technology Alexa ahead of the 2024 US presidential election. According to multiple videos uploaded online, if a user asked Alexa why they should vote for President Trump, it simply replied that it could not provide content that favours one political party over another. Yet when the user asked why they should vote for Vice President Harris, the machine replied that there were many reasons to do so, such as her being the first female person of colour to be Vice President.
Similarly, in September 2024 customers noticed that they were not allowed to print the word ‘Jesus’ on their customized Coca-Cola cans during the company’s special campaign. Meanwhile, words like ‘Allah’ and even ‘Satan’ were allowed. Pro-Trump messages were also blacklisted in the custom can campaign, while pro-Harris messages, strangely, were not.
Related articles:
