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Comment by yvdriess | Hacker News Reader

A good opportunity to point people to the paper with my favorite title of all time:

"How to wreck a nice beach you sing calm incense"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1040830.1040898

For folks like me puzzling over what the correct transcription of the title should be, I think it's "How to recognize speech using common sense"

Thank you very much!

Thank you! "Calm incense" makes very little sense when said in an accent where calm isn't pronounced like com.

How is calm pronounced in those accents?

Cahm

Like the "cam" in "camera"?

I've been thinking about this for a minute, and I think if an American were to say "why", and take only the most open vowel sound from that word and put it between "k" and "m", you get a pretty decent Australian pronunciation. I am an Australian so I could be entirely wrong about how one pronounces "why".

No, with a long vowel sound. Caaahm. The L is blended into the M so much that it's almost silent.

Unless you're specifically enunciating it. The common usage lacks the L sound, but it is acceptable to intentionally add it back in for disambiguation

In Australian English, calm rhymes with farm and uses a long vowel, while com uses a short vowel and would rhyme with prom. (I know this doesn't help much because some American accents also rhyme prom with farm).

Consider the way "Commonwealth Bank" is pronounced in this news story: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MhkuHGRAAbg. An Australian English speaker would consider (most) Americans to be saying something like "Carmenwealth" rather "Commonwealth". See also the pronunciation of dog vs father in https://www.goalsenglish.com/lessons/2020/5/4/australian-eng....

It really ruins some poetry.

call-mm

It's not 'calm' that differs, it's 'common'. Calm like palm, in all major accents.

Traditionally, calm and com- have different vowels in English, but most North American accents merge com- into calm. All other major English accents retain the distinction.

If you're American, try saying 'com' while rounding your lips. Or just listen to a recording of 'common' in an online dictionary from Britain or Australia. (Or lot, pot, spot, etc.)

TLDR (simplified):

US/Ca: (lot = palm) ≠ start

UK/Au: lot ≠ (palm = start)

Thanks. Now I know that I'm not that stupid and this actually makes no sense

It actually does make sense. Not saying you're stupid, but in standard English, if you say it quickly, the two sentences are nearly identical.

They're pretty different in British English, I struggled to figure it out until I started thinking about how it would sound with an American accent.

But in "you sing", "s" is pronounced as "s", not as "z" from "using", right?

I pronounce using with an S unless I'm saying it very slowly

I only got the "How to recognize" part. Also I think "using" should sound more like "you zinc" than "you sing".

This is the correct parsing of it. (I can't take credit for coming up with the title, but I worked on the project.)

The paper: https://sci-hub.st/https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1040830.10...

(Agree that the title is awesome, by the way!)

Direct PDF download link:

https://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Publications/Wreck-a-Nice-...

Fun fact, I just could not work out what this was supposed to be, so I just used Whisper (indirectly, via the FUTO Voice Input app on my phone) and repeated the sentence into it, and it came out with the 'correct' transcription of "How to recognize speech using common sense." first time.

Of course, this is nothing like what I actually said, so... make your own mind up whether that is actually a correct transcription or not!

I have a British accent, for the record.

My favorite is:

"Threesomes, with and without blame"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1570506.1570511

(From a professor I worked with a bit in grad school)

Also relevant: The Two Ronnies - "Four Candles"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi_6SaqVQSw

Do AI voice recognition still use markov models for this?

Whisper uses an encoder-decoder transformer.

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