Apple says he strives to repair his speech tool on the text after some social media users discovered that when they said the word “racist” in their iPhones, he typed it as “Trump”.
The technology giant suggested that the problem with its dictation service was caused by a problem which it distinguished between the words with an “R” in them.
“We are aware of a problem with the voice recognition model that feeds the dictation and we are deploying a correction today,” said an Apple spokesperson.
However, an expert in recognition of speech told the BBC that this explanation was “simply not plausible”.
Peter Bell, professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, said it was more likely that someone had changed the underlying software than the tool used.
Videos shared online show people speak the word “racist” in the dictation tool.
Sometimes it is transcribed properly – but on other occasions, it is transformed into “Trump”, before being quickly restored on the correct word.
The BBC has not been able to reproduce the error, suggesting that Apple’s fix already takes effect.
Professor Bell said that Apple’s explanation of phonetic overlap had no meaning because the two words were not similar enough to confuse an artificial intelligence system (IA).
Textword recognition models are formed by entering clips of real people speaking alongside a precise transcription of what they say.
We also teach them to understand the words in its context – for example, they could distinguish the word “cup” from “cut” if it was in the phrase “a cup of tea”.
Professor Bell says that the situation with Apple is unlikely to be a real error with its data, because its English language model would be formed on hundreds of thousands of hours of speeches, which should give it a high level of precision.
For “less resources”, he said it could be a problem of training in AI.
But he said in this case: “It probably points to someone who had access to the process.”
A former Apple employee who worked on his AIA Siri assistant told New York Times: “It smells like a serious farce.”
Apple had to resume another feature fueled by AI last month after the BBC complaints and other press organizations.
He suspended his summaries in AI of the titles of the news after having displayed false notifications on the stories – including one where he declared that the tennis player Rafael Nadal was gay.
The company announced yesterday that it would invest $ 500 billion (395 billion pounds Sterling) in the United States over the next four years, including a large data center in Texas to feed Apple Intelligence.
The CEO of the company, Tim Cook, also said that it may have to modify its policies on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) after President Donald Trump called for the end of the Dei programs.
