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From: Chris <ithinkiam@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: misc.phone.mobile.iphone
Subject: Re: iPhone dictation bug
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 08:04:02 -0000 (UTC)
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Rick <rick@nospam.com> wrote:
> On 2/26/2025 9:54 PM, Your Name wrote:
>> On 2025-02-27 02:27:34 +0000, Rick said:
>>> On 2/26/2025 9:12 PM, Alan wrote:
>>>> On 2025-02-26 17:32, badgolferman wrote:
>>>>> Apple is fixing a bug within the dictation feature on some iPhones that
>>>>> briefly suggests the word “Trump” when a word with an R consonant is
>>>>> spoken, including “racist.”
>>>>> 
>>>>> The company is responding to the controversy after some iPhone owners
>>>>> posted videos on social media this week to detail how the glitch works.
>>>>> 
>>>>> When users activated the dictation feature and said the word 
>>>>> “racist,” the
>>>>> word “Trump” appears in the text window before quickly being 
>>>>> replaced by
>>>>> the correct word, according to various videos posted online.
>>>>> 
>>>>> “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers
>>>>> Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” Apple said in a 
>>>>> statement
>>>>> sent to The Associated Press on Wednesday.
>>>>> 
>>>>> https://apnews.com/article/apple-iphone-racist-trump-glitch-d80f88d69f6ceac585904f2faa2a9212
>>>> 
>>>> Sounds like someone decided to have a little fun.
>>>> 
>>>> Good.
>>>> 
>>>> :-)
>>> 
>>> I'd hardly call it fun when someone puts a feature like this into 
>>> production software.  If the person who did this can be identified, 
>>> they should be fired and possibly even prosecuted.  Imagine the outcry 
>>> if it had flashed the word "Obama"?
>> 
>> It's unlikely to be an actual bug nor a deliberate act. There are many 
>> many places were the words "Trump" and "racist" appear, so useless AI 
>> bots simply connect the two and offer it as a suggestion. Now a specific 
>> rule will have to be added to the dictation feature to avoid that 
>> connection. Welcome to the world of idiotic AI and its garbage answers. 
>> There will be a ton of similar issues that simply haven't been stumbled 
>> across.
>> 
>> 
> 
> But this is supposed to be dictation software, not word-association 
> software.  

Dictation software has used contextual awareness to improve accuracy for
decades. This is particularly necessary to differentiate between homonyms
like their, they're and there or your and you're.  

> It shouldn't really matter that the words are often used 
> together

Of course it should. 

> - dictation software normally means translating a specific 
> spoken word into its spelling, not offering "suggestions" for a 
> different word in place of what was suggested.
> 
> Also the fact that the word Trump only flashes briefly before the 
> correct word appears definitely sounds like an intended result. 

It's probably autocorrect overruling the dictation output. Two different
systems. 

> Otherwise, a simple fix might be to just have it not flash anything 
> until the final word is identified and displayed.
> 
> 
>