Apple has been working to fix speech-to-text tools after it was discovered that some social media users typed “trump” when they spoke the word “racist” to their iPhone. They say there is.
The high-tech giant suggests that the problem with its dictation services was caused by problems in which the words distinguish between words containing “R.”
“We are aware of the issue of speech recognition models that enhance dictation and are rolling out today’s fixes,” an Apple spokesperson said.
However, speech recognition experts told the BBC that the explanation was “not plausible.”
Peter Bell, a professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, said it is likely someone changed the underlying software the tool used.
Videos shared online show people who speak the term “racist” to oral tools.
Sometimes it is correctly transcribed, but in other cases it is transformed into “playing cards” and quickly restored to the correct word.
The BBC is unable to replicate the mistake, suggesting that Apple’s fix is already in effect.
Professor Bell said Apple’s explanation of audio overlaps was pointless because the two words were not similar enough to confuse artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
The speech-to-text recognition model is trained by entering clips of real people talking along with the exact transcript of what they say.
They are also taught to understand the words in context – for example, if the word “cup” is in the phrase “cup”, then you can distinguish it from “cut”.
Professor Bell says it’s unlikely that Apple’s situation is a true data mistake. They say that the English model is trained with hundreds of thousands of hours of speech, so it should give a high level of accuracy.
He said that “lols with low resources” could be an AI training issue.
But he said in this case, “it probably refers to someone who has access to the process.”
A former Apple employee who worked on AI assistant Siri told The New York Times:
Apple had to row over to another AI-powered feature last month after complaints from the BBC and other news organizations.
We paused the news headline AI summary after displaying false notifications in the story, including where tennis player Rafael Nadal said he came out as a gay.
The company yesterday announced that it will invest $500 million (£395 million) in the US over the next four years, including large Apple Intelligence data centers, including large data centers in Texas.
The company’s CEO Tim Cook also said that after President Donald Trump called for an end to the DEI program, he may have to change his diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. I’ve said that.
