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Somewhere I have an old T-shirt from when I was consulting for Apple.

It had a sketch of a trashed-out beach with all kinds of garbage and debris.

The caption was:

I helped Apple wreck a nice beach



Hmmm... Maybe because I'm not a native speaker, but, well, I don't get it :-) Could you explain ?


“Recognise speech” / “wreck a nice beach” can sound similar (if you allow for some imprecisions, slurring, accents, etc, like noisy real-world data has).

The relevant term here is _phonemes_, the individual chunks of sounds that make the phrases up; these two phrases have shared or similar phonemes in typical English diction. e.g the first two sounds are both “reh”, “cuh”


In english its a near homophone (sounds the same as) “I helped apple recognize speech.” Its a joke about working on language recognition and still getting it wrong.


Try saying it out loud several times without thinking about the words at all, but only the sounds your voice is making as you say them:

I helped Apple wreck a nice beach

I helped Apple reck a nize beach

I helped Apple reck ug nize beach

I helped Apple reckug nize peach

I helped Apple recognize speech!


It is mentioned in the top article:

Saying “recognize speech” makes a sound that can be indistinguishable from “wreck a nice beach.”


I have (had?) that one somewhere!




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