Apple fixing iPhone bug that sees ‘Trump’ appear in text when users say ‘racist’
26 February 2025, 09:34
The tech giant said the glitch was caused by a bug in its speech recognition systems that power its voice-to-text tools.
Apple says a bug sparked a glitch which sees “Trump” appear briefly onscreen when a user says the word “racist” when using its voice-to-text feature.
A number of iPhone users have spotted the bug, with some posting clips to social media of the glitch in action, which has also sparked outrage among supporters of the US president.
The bug appears when users activate the iPhone’s voice-to-text feature, which allows people to dictate messages using their voice, and briefly shows the name “Trump” in response to a user saying the word “racist”, before quickly correcting to what was said.
Some videos posted online show the bug does not appear every time the word racist is said.
In response, Apple has said it was aware of the issue and was rolling out a fix.
The iPhone maker said that sometimes its speech recognition models that power the voice dictation tool may first display words with some phonetic overlap until further analysis of what has been said allows it to land on the correct word the user said.
It said the bug had caused “Trump” to be suggested erroneously in response to several words that include an “r” consonant.
Some conservative commentators online accused the tech giant of political bias.
The incident comes at a time of high political tension in the US following Donald Trump’s return to the White House, with social media users accusing platforms of bias towards both Republicans and Democrats in the wake of his election.
Last month, Meta was accused of boosting the profiles of Mr Trump and others in his administration following his inauguration.
After some users complained that they had apparently automatically followed the president and Vice President JD Vance’s new pages, the tech giant quickly confirmed that this was because the accounts in question were linked to their political office and not the individual, so changed hands following the presidential transition.
This meant that if users had followed them during the previous administration, they were still following them after the transition.
