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Apple has promised to quickly fix a bug in its voice-to-text feature that briefly exchanges the “R” consonant (including “racists”) for “Trump.”
The phenomenon was all the rage in a video of Tiktok and quickly caught by right-wing commentators, the $3.7TN company attempted to build relationships with the Donald Trump administration.
“We know that a problem with the speech recognition model, even if it’s said that we are launching solutions today,” Apple said on Tuesday.
The company said the error was caused by its speech recognition model, showing words with a certain level of “voice overlap”: In this case, when the user indicates the word with the “R” consonant, it implies a “Trump” word.
Many social media users posted videos of a replica of the malfunction on Tuesday, with far-right commentator Alex Jones accusing the company of “subconscious programming.”
A video shows that by Tuesday afternoon, the bug had accumulated hundreds of thousands of likes on Tiktok. The Financial Times test shows that the “Trump” advice appears on words other than “racists.”
Apple promises to spend $50 billion in the U.S. in the next four years a move that is widely seen as a prelude to the Trump administration. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted the plans in a briefing with reporters on Tuesday to show the president’s success in business affairs.
Apple faces trade tensions with China in particular and sees Trump’s hostile opportunity to EU tech regulators in an attempt to impose fines on large-scale technologies suspected of abuse of market power.
CEO Tim Cook spent years proposing to Trump at the inauguration and became famous with other Silicon Valley leaders.
The controversy over the voice-to-text function comes the same day that company shareholders voted in favor of rejecting a proposal from a conservative nonprofit that aims to revoke its diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Apple proves that among the big tech companies, Apple is rare in terms of conservative pressure to reject policies.
Speaking with shareholders on Tuesday, Cook said Apple is committed to its policies, although the company “may need to make some changes” to comply with the legal landscape around DEI.
Software errors recently proved Apple’s problem. Last month, iPhone manufacturers removed an automatic news digest feature that showed false or misleading information.
When it launched “Apple Intelligence,” Apple overhauled its iPhone operating system, a set of generated AI features that hoped it would boost sales of its flagship devices, but received a mixed reception.
