Apple will fix today an iPhone dictation bug that replaces "Racist" with "Trump"
The connection between Apple CEO Tim Cook and U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be strong enough to survive Apple stockholders voting down a proposal that would have the company consider ending its DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies. Trump is trying to end DEI as he mentioned this morning in a post on his social media platform TruthSocial. "DEI was a hoax that has been very bad for our country. DEI is gone," the president wrote.
Today, a new issue has come to light involving the president and Apple, and this time the tech giant's most important product, the iPhone, is involved. A bug in the iPhone's dictation feature quickly shows the name "Trump" when a word with the R consonant is spoken. As numerous news reports note, this glitch works with the word "racist." I tested this on my iPhone 15 Pro Max and the "Trump" name did come up very briefly in the text field of the Messages app after the offending "R" word was spoken. Others also were able to reproduce the bug.
I also tested voice-to-text on iPhone, speaking the word “racist.” For a brief moment, it switches the word to “Trump,” and then BACK to “racist.” pic.twitter.com/sbng2vFLRm
— Austin C. Mullen (@austincmullen) February 25, 2025
After the Trump name appears in the text field, it is replaced by the original word (in this case "racist"). Interestingly, other "R" words did not set off the same reaction from the iPhone's dictation feature, and saying "racist" into the device did not always result in the appearance of the president's last name.
In a statement, Apple said, "We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today." Apple blamed the issue on the speech-to-text feature stating that it will occasionally display words first with some "phonetic overlap" to the spoken word. The feature will then do further analysis to show the word that the user had actually said.
You might recall that back in September, a couple of months before the presidential election, Amazon's Alexa digital assistant refused to answer why voters should vote for Trump. Alexa did show myriad reasons to vote for Harris. The only AI platform willing to give fair and balanced reasons to vote for both sides was Grok, X's AI-based assistant.
We believe that the Trump-Cook relationship is strong enough to survive this bug although if it happens again, all bets are off.
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