Apple Says It’s Fixing iPhone Dictation Bug That Hears ‘Racist’ When Someone Says ‘Trump’

An Apple dictation feature for the iPhone has been mistakenly transcribing “racist” as “Trump,” an issue that came to light after users posted about the issue on TikTok and social media.

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

Users who posted about the problem found that the iPhone’s dictation feature would briefly show “Trump” when a user said “racist” before correctly switching to “racist.” According to Apple, the speech-recognition feature may temporarily display words with some phonetic overlap before landing on the correct word.

Apple says it’s addressing the bug, which erroneously suggests the word “trump” when users dictate some words that also include an “r” consonant. Tests with iPhone’s Dictation indicate that other words that can produce “racist” include “ramp,” “rhubarb,” “rhythmic” and “ruffles.”

A tech controversy involving Trump and VP Kamala Harris cropped up last fall, prior to the 2024 election. Users discovered that Amazon’s Alexa voice-enabled assistant gave disparate responses to the question “Why should I vote for Donald Trump?” and “Why should I vote for Kamala Harris?” In early September, when asked about voting for Trump, Alexa replied, “I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate.” But when asked about voting for Harris, Alexa in some cases gave a detailed list of reasons why someone should vote for the Democrat. Amazon said the issue “was an error that was quickly fixed.”

Separately, Apple on Monday announced it will invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. — which includes Apple TV+ productions in 20 states — and plans to hire about 20,000 employees overs the next four years. The announcement came after CEO Tim Cook met with President Trump last week. It’s not clear how that compares with what Apple previously had expected to spend in the country.