Apple to fix iPhone dictation bug that replaces word 'racist' with 'Trump'
37 comments
·February 26, 2025beardyw
Not sure why the headline was modified here. If it was "Apple decides to not fix ...." that would be news.
dietsche
on my iphone it briefly displays “you” when i say racist in the imessage app. i’m curious what happens for other people…
josefritzishere
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
CivBase
There's no way this is a bug, right? There is no phonetic overlap between the words "racist" and "Trump", and the political implications seem too obvious for it to be coincidence. Surely this was intentional, even if it wasn't sanctioned by Apple's leadership.
theglenn88_
I feel this could also be Apple collecting common replacements from their customers devices and applying the suggestions to updated dictionaries. They must collect that data from devices, I would have thought.
CivBase
But the point of the feature is to write the words the user dictates, isn't it? So if it correctly recognized the word "racist", why would it replace it with "Trump"? The application must know that's not what the user dictated.
The most likely explanation to me is that Apple probably has a feature which automatically replaces expletives so that users don't accidentally send messages with offensive language that was not intended. It's probably a simple substitution which maps known expletives to suitable replacements. A disgruntled developer probably added this substitution and, for whatever reason, it didn't get caught until it hit production. I don't know if this is true, but it seems like a reasonable explanation to me.
aithrowawaycomm
The only video I saw of this happening seemed to be in a text conversation where they were previously talking about politics. I don't know how Apple's transcription works but it might have jumped the gun simply because the guy talks about politics a lot + something about his voice.
I see no indication that this is an ubiquitous issue.
CivBase
The embedded TikTok video in the linked article shows someone replicating the issue.
The video showed two attempts, with the issue only occurring on the second attempt. It isn't obvious how many attempts were made before the start of the video. The rest of the text conversation visible in the video did not appear to be political, but it's impossible to say what was discussed before that.
aithrowawaycomm
That is the video I am talking about.
dqv
> There is no phonetic overlap between the words "racist" and "Trump"
This is true in a room full of people who aren't linguists just like it's true that the government doesn't use SQL in a room full of Elon orbiters. I don't even like Apple.
/ˈtɹəmp/
/ˈɹeɪsɪst/
There is a plausible overlap right at the beginning. You just made incorrect assumptions. You seem to assume that English has a universal phonology, that speakers all pronounce things the same way every time (i.e. you failed to account for alternation[0] on an individual speaker level, let alone the variance between dialects), and the fact that small tongue movements have an outsized effect on the produced vowel sound.
[ᵗ°ɹ] and /ɹ/ sound the same under the right environmental conditions. If the /t/ is quiet enough, then the /ɹ/ can easily "outcompete" the /t/.
/ə/ and /e/ are close neighbors. With natural variance, they can sound similar under the right environmental conditions.
And finally, many people who say /ɹ/ also introduce a very short, almost unvoiced /ə/ before transitioning to /eɪ/, since, again, /ə/ and /e/ are close neighbors.
So yes, they do have phonetic overlap, maybe not for you, but for other people it's plausible... and probable. If you watch the original video, they're recording a very short clip which gives the STT engine very little context (and they had to do it twice to reproduce the behavior because one of the attempts did not replace "racist" with "Trump").
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternation_(linguistics)
bell-cot
Maybe. Or, maybe the substitution was "hallucinated" by an AI with a poorly-curated training set. And nothing resembling Actual Intelligence - as in human common sense - to realize that the substitution was both a mistake, and a PR disaster for Apple.
techorange
PR disaster seems a bit much. I’m trying to think what I would do if something similar happened to Biden or Kamala and I can’t imagine being moved? I would think the right, being more pro freedom of speech, and pro-comedy would let it go. It’s kind of funny really.
bell-cot
President Trump is neither Biden nor Harris, and is nothing resembling a "free speech" ideological purist. He is an extremely powerful and temperamental man, who is extremely quick to use his power against those who he perceives to be his enemies.
techjamie
It could be something like a small LLM helping the transcription do its job, and because "Trump" and "racist" appear frequently together in online discourse, they're tied closely together in the model.
You can actually get something similar to happen yourself, too, if you transcribe enough text with Whisper. I've had Whisper reword sentences in ways that don't sound like source audio at all, but still work as what someone might actually say.
hagbard_c
[flagged]
techorange
By saying it was intentional are you applying some kind of insider knowledge? Seems like we should wait to judge until we have all of the facts.
hagbard_c
I do not have inside information but I do have common sense and I try to stay on the right side of Occam's razor. There are countless words with the 'r' sound in it but by pure coincidence it happens to be the word 'racist' which gets 'confused' with the name of the current president of the USA even though there isn't even that much of an 'r' in his name and what 'r' it contains has a markedly different pronunciation than the one in the president's name:
racist: /ˈɹeɪ.sɪst/
trump: /tɹʌmp/ or /t͡ʃɹʌmp/
skyyler
[flagged]
InsideOutSanta
Phase 1: Replace "racist" with "Trump"
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Profit
hagbard_c
If you want to call these activist employees 'gnomes' that is up to you. As to their motives I think you know and I wonder why you feign ignorance. So be it but I think it better to walk around with my eyes open.
BuckRogers
Haters getting mad because the war is already lost for them. Trump is the President. Resorting to little games like this, and will be fun to watch the pain and tears for the next 4 years.
archagon
People who enjoy watching others get hurt are in dire need of institutionalization.
BuckRogers
[flagged]
TheNewsIsHere
There is no conspiracy here. Just an honest mistake that happens to be hilarious and truthful, but probably good form to fix.
BuckRogers
I agree it's not a conspiracy at all. It was a blatant attempt by a renegade developer who will be named and shamed.
TheNewsIsHere
Do you really think so?
We get gaffes like this from new AIs/LLMs/autocorrect/clever-branching-algorithms-of-the-day about every 1-2 years.
aaron695
Variety - "Tests with iPhone’s Dictation indicate that other words that can produce “trump” include “ramp,” “rhubarb,” “rhythmic” and “ruffles.”"
Also [dupe] and kinda lame for the mainstream media to be picking up.... and then lying since Variety said that 16 hours ago, unless Variety was wrong, but that's trivial for the BBC/Newsweek to check.
Gets all the nut job HN conspiracy people out of the woodwork and keeps both sides fighting, so I guess they get their clicks.
It is interesting technically, if only there was a forum for that.
null
Many moons ago, I randomly discovered that the built-in text to speech engine on Windows 2000 would pronounce “crotch” as “crow’s nest.” Never found any reference to it online at the time, although today it’s pretty well documented. It’s possible I was one of the first people to find that.
I’m sure it was a bug and not some kind of self-censoring thing, but I had (and still have) no good explanation for it. Language is weird.