After Apple AI fails, grandmother receives an X-rated message

The Dunfermline woman spoke about her shock after Apple’s voice-to-text service accidentally inserted into a message that left references to sex and apparent insults in the garage.

Louise Littlejohn, 66, received a voicemail message from Motherwell’s watcher Land Rover Garage on Wednesday, and invited her to the event.

Apple’s AI-powered service has turned it into text messaging. To her surprise, she asked if she could “have sex” before calling her a “part of ****.”

Mrs. Little John told BBC News: “I was shocked at first – surprised – but I found it very interesting.

“The garages are about to sell cars. Instead, they don’t know about it and leave an insulting message. It’s not their fault.”

Both Apple and Garage declined to comment.

Experts told the BBC that the AI ​​system could have struggled with some due to the caller’s Scottish accent, but the background noise in the garage and the fact that he was reading the script were far more likely factors.

Mrs. Little John said she initially thought the phone was a scam, but she recognized the number involved as coming from the Motherwell area.

She had bought a car from the same garage a few years ago.

The BBC has heard the audio left behind by garage workers and confirmed it is a traditional business call.

The transcription is so messy that it’s hard to decipher in the wrong place, but the reference to “sex” may actually be when the caller mentioned “sixth” in March.

The BBC has removed the names of garage employees.

“Hello Mrs. Little John, that’s ____ from Lookers Land Rover in Lanarkshire. I hope you’re fine. A quick call to see if you’ve received an invitation to an event that you received an invitation to our new car.

“A little call to see if it’s something you want to do and see if you can see which booking slots are right for you. If that’s what you’re interested in, call ____, listen to ____. Thank you.”

Apple’s website details how those voicemail transcriptions are restricted to English voicemail received on iPhones with iOS 10 operating systems or later, and how transcriptions “depend on the quality of the recording.”

Peter Bell, a professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, had heard the message left to Mrs. Little John.

He suggested that it was “a challenging end for speech-to-text engines to deal with.”

He believes there are several factors that can lead to unauthorized transcription.

The fact that it is on the phone, and therefore the fact that the background noise of the call is difficult to speak to some degree in the way the garage worker speaks is like he is reading a prepared script rather than speaking in a natural way.

“All of these factors contribute to what the system is doing badly,” he added. “The bigger question is why do you output that kind of content?

“If you’re creating a commonly used speech-to-text system, you’d think there’s a safeguard for that.”

Many in Scotland remember a sketch of the BBC comedy show Burnistoun when two Scottish men were trapped after the voice-activated lift couldn’t understand the accent.

It has seen hundreds of millions of views online, and some Scots feel they have a voice technology.

In 2016, Scots was asked to use voice recognition technology to help mobile phones decipher their accents better.

For Professor Bell, the Scottish accent may have influenced here along with all the other factors, but in ideal audio conditions, the problem that comes from the Scottish accent is “something of the past.”

However, this is not the first time Apple’s speech tool has recently hit a headline for the wrong reasons.

A few weeks ago, the tech giant said it was working to fix the speech-to-text tool after it was discovered that some social media users typed “trump” when they spoke the word “racist” to their iPhone.

Apple also paused the news headline AI summary after displaying false notifications in the story.