Apple is currently resolving a significant issue with its speech-to-text tool, Dictation, after users noted that speaking the word "racist" could sometimes result in it being transcribed as "Trump." The company indicated this error stems from difficulties in their speech recognition model, but experts question the plausibility of this explanation. Notably, several videos show inconsistent results when using the Dictation function, while a professor of speech technology noted the complexity of speech recognition and the extensive training data that should prevent such mistakes from occurring. The situation raises concerns about the reliability of AI-based transcription systems.
"We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today," an Apple spokesperson said.
Peter Bell, professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, said it was more likely that someone had altered the underlying software that the tool used.
The BBC has not been able to replicate the mistake, suggesting Apple's fix is already taking effect.
Prof Bell says the situation with Apple is unlikely to be a genuine mistake with its data because its English language model would be trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech.
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