Taiming Zhang claims iPad voice function is racist, takes Apple Sales to Human Rights Tribunal

Taiming Zhang claimed the speech setting on his iPad was discriminatory. Photo / Apple Inc

A frequent claimant in the country’s top human rights jurisdiction has tried to claim that software installed on his iPad is racist.

Taiming Zhang is no stranger to the Human Rights Review Tribunal, having lodged five claims so far with a body that was set up to deal with only the most serious human rights and privacy violations New Zealand has to offer.

Zhang, however, has used the tribunal to attempt to take a popular Wellington hotel and bar to task after staff provided him with Coke Zero, rather than Coke No Sugar, while in another previous bid he attempted to take Wellington restaurant Red Hill to task after he learned he would have to pay for two if he wanted to eat a shared meal called a hotpot by himself.

The tribunal struck out both claims, noting in the Red Hill decision that his claim lacked seriousness and was an abuse of process.

His latest claim lodged with the tribunal, which has the power to award damages up to $250,000, is that software on his iPad is racist, and he has attempted to take Apple Sales New Zealand, a local division of tech giant Apple Inc, to task for it.

Zhang purchased an Apple iPad Pro from Noel Leeming in July 2024. The device has a feature called “speech selection”, which reads aloud certain text displayed on it. The voice in which it reads has a menu of different kinds of synthesised voices that can be used for different languages. All languages have separate voices.

Zhang’s claim was that only when the system display language was Chinese and someone asked it to translate into spoken English or French did it do so with an accent, and this amounts to discrimination on the grounds of race and ethnic or national origins.

Strike out: A frivolous and vexatious claim

Apple Sales, a division of tech giant Apple, applied to strike Zhang’s claim out on the basis that it was frivolous, vexatious and was otherwise an abuse of process. The company denied its product was discriminatory in any way as Zhang claimed.

In its submissions to the tribunal, the company said that its speech function automatically recognises different languages and reads them aloud. It said any accent in the speech was a result of the system language synthesiser reading and it did not exclusively occur when the language was set to Chinese.

Apple also raised the point that Zhang had recently attempted to take its competitor Samsung to the tribunal, which claim was also struck out.

As part of that claim, Zhang said a Chinese SIM card he’d tried to use in a new Samsung Galaxy Note 20 didn’t work, and this failure amounted to a discrimination against him on the basis of race.

In striking out the Samsung claim, the tribunal said his issue with the phone arose from technical or functional problems that had nothing to do with his race, ethnicity or national origin.

The sales manager of Apple Sales in New Zealand told the tribunal this division of the company sells Apple hardware to telecommunications companies, who supply retailers, who in turn sell the products to customers. Apple Sales argued it did not sell the iPad to Zhang, Noel Leeming did.

Zhang’s claim was specifically against Apple Sales New Zealand, which does not sell, license or otherwise supply software used on Apple devices to its users. Rather, the software is supplied via a licence agreement between the customer and Apple Inc, in which Apple Sales is not involved.

The tribunal said that even if the company had supplied the iPad to Zhang, which it did not, his claim had no reasonable prospect of success.

“Having determined that Mr Zhang’s claim discloses no reasonable cause of action we consider that it is appropriate for us to exercise our discretion to strike out Mr Zhang’s claim in whole,” the tribunal found.

Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.