Grandmother gets X-rated message after Apple AI fail

A woman from Dunfermline has spoken of her shock after an Apple voice-to-text service mistakenly inserted a reference to sex – and an apparent insult – into a message left by a garage.

Louise Littlejohn, 66, received a voicemail message on Wednesday from a Lookers Land Rover garage in Motherwell inviting her to an event.

An artificial intelligence (AI) powered service offered by Apple turned it into a text message which – to her surprise – asked if she been “able to have sex” before calling her a “piece of ****”.

Mrs Littlejohn told BBC News: “Initially I was shocked – astonished – but then I thought that is so funny. The text was obviously quite inappropriate.

“The garage is trying to sell cars, and instead of that they are leaving insulting messages without even being aware of it. It is not their fault at all.”

Apple and the garage both declined to comment.

An expert has told the BBC the AI system may have struggled in part because of the caller’s Scottish accent, but far more likely factors were the background noise at the garage and the fact he was reading off a script.

Mrs Littlejohn said she initially thought the call was a scam, but then recognised that the associated number was from the Motherwell area.

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

The BBC has listened to the audio left by the garage worker and confirmed it was a conventional business call.

The transcription is so jumbled it’s hard to decipher where it went wrong, but the reference to “sex” may have in fact been when the caller mentioned the “sixth” of March.

The BBC has removed the name of the garage employee:

“Hi Mrs Littlejohn, it is ____ here from Lookers Land Rover in Lanarkshire. I hope you are well. Just a wee call to see if you have received your invite to our new car INAUDIBLE event that we do have on between the sixth and tenth of March.

“Just a wee call to see if it is something you were looking to come along to, and to see if we can confirm an appointment slot that would be suitable for yourself. If it is something you would be interested in, feel free to give me a call on ____, ask for myself ____ INAUDIBLE. Thank you.”

On Apple’s website, it details how their voicemail transcription is limited to voicemails in English received on an iPhone with iOS 10 operating system or later, and the transcription “depends on the quality of the recording”.

Peter Bell, a professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, listened to the message left for Mrs Littlejohn.

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

He believes there are a number of factors which could have resulted in rogue transcription:

• The fact it is over the telephone and, therefore, harder to hear
• There is some background noise in the call
• The way the garage worker speaks is like he is reading a prepared script rather than speaking in a natural way

“All of those factors contribute to the system doing badly, ” he added. “The bigger question is why it outputs that kind of content.

“If you are producing a speech-to-text system that is being used by the public, you would think you would have safeguards for that kind of thing.”

Many people in Scotland will remember a sketch from the BBC comedy show Burnistoun, when two Scottish men get trapped after the voice-activated lift can’t understand their accents.

It has hundreds of millions of views online, and tapped into a feeling some Scots have about voice technology.

In 2016, Scots were asked to work with voice recognition technology in a bid to help mobile phones decipher the accent better.

For Prof Bell, the Scottish accent may have had an impact here along with all other factors, but – with ideal audio conditions – problems that technology will have with the Scottish accent are “a thing of the past”.

However, this not the first time that Apple’s speech tools have recently hit the headlines for the wrong reasons.

A few weeks ago, the tech giant said it was working to fix its speech-to-text tool after some social media users found that when they spoke the word “racist” into their iPhones it typed it out as “Trump”.

Apple also suspended its AI summaries of news headlines after it displayed false notifications on stories.