Apple is working to fix an issue after its speech-to-text tool transcribed the term ‘racist’ as ‘Trump’.
Apple’s AI tool transcribed the word ‘racist’ as ‘Trump’.
The tech behemoth says it is working to fix an issue that it suggests comes from its Dictation service being unable to distinguish between words that have an ‘r’ in them.
Videos posted online show people speaking the word ‘racist’ into the Dictation tool. It is sometimes transcribed correctly but on other occasions it turns into ‘Trump’, before being quickly corrected to the right word.
An Apple spokesperson said: “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today.”
However, an expert in speech recognition argued that Apple’s explanation is “just not plausible”.
Peter Bell, professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, claims it is more likely that the underlying software used by the tool had been altered.
Professor Bell argues that Apple’s explanation of phonetic overlap does not make sense as the words ‘racist’ and ‘Trump’ are not similar enough to confuse an artificial intelligence (AI) system.
He suggests that Apple’s issue is unlikely to be a genuine mistake with the data as its English language model would be trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech and should therefore have a high level of accuracy.
Professor Bell told BBC News: “It probably points to somebody that’s got access to a process.”
A former Apple employee who worked on its AI assistant Siri suspects that a prank has been pulled.
They told the New York Times: “This smells like a serious prank.”
Apple AI tool mistakenly transcribed the word ‘racist’ as ‘Trump’
