"We Are Aware": Drama as Apple AI Tool Transcribed the Word 'Racist' as 'Trump'
- Tech giant, Apple has reacted to a report on social media claiming its AI tool transcribing the word "racist" as Trump
- Apple disclosed that it is working to fix its speech-to-text tool after the incident which occurred on iPhones
- Peter Bell, professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, has explained what could be responsible for it
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Legit.ng journalist Adekunle Dada has over 7 years of experience covering metro, government policy, and international events
United States - Tech giant, Apple has explained the reason the word "racist" is transcribed as "Trump" in iPhones.
It was gathered that some social media users found that when they spoke the word "racist" into their iPhones it typed it out as "Trump."
Source: Twitter
Legit.ng reports that Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America (USA).
As reported by BBC, while reacting to the discovery, Apple said it is working to fix its speech-to-text tool.
An Apple spokesperson suggested the issue with its Dictation service was caused by the problem of distinguishing between words with an "r" in them.
"We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,"
Some of the videos shared on social media showed people speaking the word "racist" into the Dictation tool.
It was discovered that sometimes it is transcribed correctly - but on other occasions, it is turned into "Trump", before being quickly restored to the correct word.
Peter Bell, professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, said Apple's explanation of phonetic overlap did not make sense.
He argued that the two words were not similar enough to confuse an artificial intelligence (AI) system.
According to Bell, it was more likely that someone had altered the underlying software that the tool used.
Prof Bell said the situation is unlikely to be a genuine mistake with the tech giant's data. He explained that Apple’s English language model would be trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech, which should give it a high level of accuracy.
For "less well-resourced languages" he said it could be an AI training issue.
But he said in this case: "It probably points to somebody that's got access to the process."
Source: Getty Images
Speech-to-text recognition
Speech-to-text recognition models are trained by inputting clips of real people speaking alongside an accurate transcript of what they say.
They are also taught to understand words in context - for example, they could distinguish the word "cup" from "cut" if it was within the phrase "a cup of tea".
Legit.ng also reported that a Malawian pastor, Shepherd Bushiri, of ECG church made an interesting and funny take on racism.
The clergyman said that as much as people are still giving preference to things in white, racism will continue.
Many people who reacted to his video on Instagram found his submission comedic while some partly agreed.
Donald Trump: US Deports 135 Migrants
Meanwhile, Legit.ng reported that migrants from around the world — including dozens of children — landed on Thursday evening, February 20, in San José, Costa Rica’s capital, after having been deported from the United States (US) for illegally crossing the southern border.
Their plane was the first such flight to arrive in Costa Rica and carried the latest group of migrants from countries in the Eastern Hemisphere to be deported by the US to Central America — a new tactic in the Trump administration’s crackdown on migration.
Costa Rica’s government has stipulated that the migrants remain in the country no more than 30 days before being sent to their countries of origin
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Source: Legit.ng
