Re: iPhone dictation bug

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.