Re: iPhone dictation bug

On 2025-02-27 13:29:34 +0000, Rick said:

On 2/27/2025 1:12 AM, Your Name wrote:

On 2025-02-27 03:50:57 +0000, Rick said:

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. It shouldn't really matter that the words are often used together - 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. Otherwise, a simple fix might be to just have it not flash anything until the final word is identified and displayed.

 Dictation software often flashes up words and then changes them as it gets more context to complete phrases and sentences. More and more newer dictation software is also using silly AI to (supposedly) work out what the word should be, so the associations it "learns" from various sources will be there as part of the process.

 If that's the case, it should be a simple fix to just not have it flash the word as the AI is considering different alternatives.  Not sure what real value there is to have the software flashing through alternatives other than to make you think it's cogitating.

In some dictation software you can press the spacebar (or whatever key) to accept the currently suggested word, similar to the way you can in apps with predictive typing.