Apple’s iPhone voice-to-text feature is sparking controversy after a viral TikTok video showed a user speaking the word ‘racist,’ which at first showed up as ‘Trump’ before switching back to ‘racist.’
Fox News Digital was able to replicate the issue multiple times. The voice-to-text dictation feature was observed briefly flashing ‘Trump’ when a user said ‘racist’ before it quickly changed back to ‘racist’ – just like in the viral TikTok video.
However, ‘Trump’ did not appear every time a user said ‘racist.’
The voice-to-text feature also wrote words like ‘reinhold’ and ‘you’ when a user said ‘racist.’ Most of the time, the feature accurately wrote ‘racist.’
An Apple spokesperson said Tuesday that the company is addressing the issue.
‘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 spokesperson said.
Apple says that the speech recognition models that power dictation may temporarily display words with some phonetic overlap, before landing on the correct word. The bug affects other words with an ‘r’ consonant when dictated, Apple says.
This is not the first time technology has sparked controversy over what was perceived as a slight against President Donald Trump.
A video went viral in September showing the Amazon Alexa virtual assistant explaining reasons for voting for then-Vice President Kamala Harris while refusing to provide similar responses for Trump.
Representatives from the online shopping giant briefed staffers from the House Judiciary Committee about the incident and explained that Alexa uses pre-programmed manual overrides created by Amazon’s information team to respond to certain prompts from users, according to a source familiar with the briefing.
For example, Alexa would tell users who asked for reasons to vote for Trump or then-President Joe Biden, ‘I cannot provide content that promotes this specific political party or candidate.’
Prior to the release of the viral video, Amazon had only programmed manual overrides for Biden and Trump, failing to add Harris because very few users were asking Alexa about reasons to vote for her, the source said.
Amazon became aware of the issue with Alexa’s pro-Harris responses within one hour of the video being posted on X and going viral. The company fixed the issue with a manual override for such questions about Harris within two hours of the video going up, according to the source.
Before the fix was deployed, Fox News Digital prompted Alexa with questions asking for reasons to vote for Harris and received a response saying that ‘she is a female of color with a comprehensive plan to address racial injustice and inequality throughout the country.’
The source said that Amazon apologized for Alexa’s display of political bias at the briefing and said that while it has a policy that aims to prevent Alexa from ‘having a political opinion’ or ‘bias for or against a particular party or particular candidate… obviously we are here today because we did not meet that bar in this incident.’
The tech giant has since audited its system and has manual overrides in place for all candidates and a number of election-related prompts. Previously, Alexa only had manual overrides for presidential candidates.
FOX Business’ Eric Revell, Hillary Vaugh, and Chase Williams contributed to this report.
