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" appeared in the text window before quickly being replaced by the correct word, according to various videos posted online, per the AP.
"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 on Wednesday. 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 AP couldn't duplicate the problem on Wednesday, a day after it emerged. The New York Times, however, said it was able to replicate the blip "several times." John Burkey, an ex-member of Apple's Siri team who's still in touch with his former colleagues, says the issue seemed to pop up after Apple ran an update to one of its servers. Still, he suspects someone may have intentionally embedded the glitch into the phone's coding. "This smells like a serious prank," he says. (More iPhone stories.)
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