Apple Says It’s Fixing iPhone Dictation Bug That Interprets ‘Racist’ as ‘Trump’

A man holds an iPhone in a store in Nantes, France, on Sept. 13, 2023. Stephane Mahe/Reuters

Tech giant Apple said on Feb. 25 that it is working to fix a bug in the iPhone’s speech-to-text feature, which momentarily displays “Trump” when users say the word “racist” before the transcription software corrects itself.

The bug happens when iPhone users say the word “racist” out loud while holding down the microphone key.

“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” an Apple spokesperson said in a statement to media outlets.

The spokesperson said that the glitch sometimes occurs when users dictate some words that include an “r” consonant.

During an initial analysis of the speech recognition models that power the phone’s software, it was found that the system sometimes displays words that sound phonetically similar before identifying the words the user intended to use, the spokesperson said.

The issue was highlighted by a viral video on the social media platform TikTok.

Apple’s dictation feature for iPhones uses artificial intelligence (AI) to transcribe a user’s voice into text and automatically insert punctuation, depending on the language being dictated.

It is not the first time that Apple’s AI-powered features have experienced issues. In January, the company temporarily disabled a feature for users of its beta iPhone, iPad and Mac software that summarizes and groups together notifications, following complaints about inaccurate information.

The BBC filed an official complaint with Apple in December 2024 after its intelligence summaries generated a false headline about Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

According to the BBC, the summary falsely made it appear as though BBC News had published an article claiming Mangione had shot himself.

The notification was “otherwise accurate in its summaries” of news articles about Syria and South Korea, according to the BBC.

“With the latest beta software releases of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Notification summaries for the News & Entertainment category will be temporarily unavailable,” an Apple spokesperson told media outlets in January.

Apple Announces $500 Billion Investment

The latest glitch comes one day after Apple announced plans to invest more than $500 billion in the United States over the next four years to support initiatives that focus on artificial intelligence, silicon engineering, and software development.

Apple announced its “largest-ever” spending commitment against the backdrop of impending tariffs that are set to affect the company’s imports.

In February, the Trump administration imposed 10 percent tariffs on goods imported from China—a key manufacturing hub for Apple’s products—over the Chinese communist regime’s role in the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

The White House also announced plans to expand its tariff agenda to all of America’s trading partners, including India, which could affect Apple’s imports from the country.

Trump, who met with Apple CEO Tim Cook last week, welcomed Apple’s investment announcement in a Feb. 25 social media post, attributing it to the company’s “faith in what we [the administration] are doing, without which, they wouldn’t be investing ten cents.”

The Epoch Times has contacted Apple for further comment.

Naveen Athrappully contributed to this report.