Apple has confirmed that it is fixing a glitch in its iPhone speech-to-text feature, which briefly displays the word “Trump” when users dictate the word “racist”, before autocorrecting itself.
The issue has sparked outrage among Trump supporters and conservative commentators, including Infowars host Alex Jones. Several iPhone users have posted videos on social media testing and replicating the glitch.
NBC Confirms Bug on Multiple Devices
Sky News’ U.S. partner, NBC News, verified that multiple iPhone devices exhibited the issue. However, the glitch did not occur consistently across all tests.
When using voice dictation, saying “racist” would initially produce the text “Trump” before quickly correcting to the intended word.
Apple Responds: Fix in Progress
Apple acknowledged the issue on Tuesday, stating:
“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers dictation, and we are rolling out a fix today.”
The company explained that speech recognition models sometimes display words with phonetic similarities before finalizing the intended word. In this case, the system was incorrectly suggesting “Trump” in response to certain words containing the letter “r”.
Political Bias Concerns in Big Tech
This incident has fueled ongoing accusations of political bias in major tech companies.
Recently, Meta faced criticism after users claimed they were automatically following pages linked to Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance. Meta defended the practice, stating that it is standard procedure for accounts tied to U.S. government offices rather than individual politicians.
Additionally, Instagram searches reportedly failed to display results for certain hashtags, including #democrat, an issue Meta later acknowledged and corrected.
In September, Amazon’s Alexa faced backlash for reportedly refusing to comment on Trump while providing detailed responses about Kamala Harris. The company later patched the issue.
White House Yet to Respond
As controversy around Apple’s speech-to-text glitch continues, the White House has not issued a statement regarding the matter. Apple, meanwhile, assures users that a fix is already in progress to resolve the unintended word suggestions.
