Apple to fix iPhone dictation glitch that suggests replacing ‘racist’ with ‘Trump’
London, Feb 25: 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 on Wednesday.
The company said that the speech recognition models that power the voice-to-text feature might show words with some phonetic overlap.
It also said that other words that have an “r” consonant were also erroneously triggering the bug. (AP)
Church condemns provocative carnival float linking Jesus to church sex abuse
Cologne (Germany), Feb 25: Germany’s Catholic Church has sharply criticised a carnival float made for a big street parade in the western city of Cologne that linked Jesus with the church abuse scandal.
The float, which was unveiled Tuesday, shows an altar boy in front of a confessional with an arm sticking out and an outstretched hand luring the boy inside. On the side of the confessional, bold letters read “Jesus loves you.” The Cologne archdiocese condemned the float as “tasteless.” “The inscription on the confessional – Jesus loves you’ – directly associates Jesus, the Son of God, with the abuse,” it wrote in a letter published Tuesday on its website.
“It is suggested that Jesus himself is sitting in the confessional and wants to pull the altar boy into it with a wave of his hand; at the very least, Jesus is being instrumentalized here,” the letter said.
The floats for Cologne’s annual Shrove Monday parade are famous for poking fun at the powerful and mockingly referring to controversies. But the church’s reaction suggested that the city’s carnival committee went too far this time. (AP)