Friday vaguely amusing

Me to Phyllis after he put down a plastic bowl and it rattled away for what seemed ages, "I bet you can't do that again". After a couple of tries, he almost made its rattle as long. 

I am having surgery today, nothing life threatening, unless it goes horribly wrong. I'll have an overnight stay and should return on Saturday, but I know I won't feel very good, so I am not sure when you will hear from me again.

Oh, the cost

I have a post scheduled for tomorrow and I wasn't going to post this, but why shouldn't I. Most of you are quite frank about medical matters. I am posting this Thursday night, and I am sure it needs some editing, but publish and be damned.  

On Friday I will attend The Alfred Hospital for abdominal hernia repair surgery, The Alfred being a public no cost hospital. This is a result of my kidney ureter surgery a couple of years ago where one entry point for the telescopic surgery bulged out post surgery. It is not life threatening but unsightly (I still have vanity) and can potentially be an issue. Obviously my six pack stomach muscles have a weak point.

The kidney surgery was within the private health system, and I have full top private health insurance, yet the cost to me was $3000 to $4000. In my opinion given the time lines, I would have been better dealt with by the public hospital system, which is no cost to the user.

For the hernia I had a pre surgery appointment mid last year at a small public hospital, associated with The Alfred. I guess it was thought with my other medical issues, I was too high risk and I needed to be at the major public hospital where there is first class expertise, should there be an issue. I had another pre surgery appointment at the major hospital, The Alfred. I can't remember why I had to have a CAT scan but I did and a area of concern was noted in my pancreas. That led to an MRI scan, and as far as my doctor could tell, it was not of concern. 

Then I waited, and waited and waited. About six weeks ago I called to find out what the delay was, and I was told it was waiting for the anaesthetist to sign off on my surgery.  Around ten days later, the hospital called and told me a date for surgery, and to expect a letter with the details. As per the usual hospital's poor communication system, it came via email. It can be a text, a letter, an email or phone call, and they wonder why patients get confused.

I will stay overnight and neighbour HH will collect me the next day. I may be in a room of six people, and I won't get a half bottle of wine with my dinner, but I can live with that and save thousands of dollars, even though I have private health insurance. 

I did think the wait for surgery was becoming too long, and I was about to call a certain The Alfred Hospital phone number after I found out about being treated at the public hospital if you have private health insurance, whereby the hospital claims on you insurance and you don't pay anything.

Meanwhile after my latest skin cancer check, an area of concern was found. It isn't a melanoma but needs to be removed and I've been referred to The Alfred because it is close to my eye and normal treatment is too risky. I've come to know The Alfred rather more than I prefer. Anything skin cancer related is triaged quickly with a fast first appointment, usually within four weeks.

So, I guess I won't be posting on Saturday morning, at the very least. If it like my last hernia surgery the recovery period takes quite some time. 

You say 'tomayto'.

l found this interesting and surprising as I headed down a rabbit hole. Although Australia is more inclined to British English, it is changing.

Great Niece: Auntie Andrew, I've pressed the button for the elevator.

Me: It's called a lift here in Australia, dear child.

Great Niece: The elevator is here. 

I felt like a bag of wheat being transported in the elevator. 

What has surprised me is how many American pronunciations I use, and I guess most Australians do too. It is fairly quick from the list below to list the American pronunciations I use. 

Adult

Basil. I don't use either pronunciation. I say it like the name, or can the name be said differently too. 

Buddha

Esplanade

Evolution

Falcon, but I can remember using the English pronunciation too

Garage, but see above

Often, neither. I say orfen. 

Pasta

Privacy

Stance, I go either way, actually right in the middle.

Yoghurt

My car understands the navigation order "Home', but it can't understand me giving an address to travel to. I gave up on that.

On the home front, of course I am constantly dealing with accents. Phyllis and Kosov began by respectfully speaking only their fluent but slightly quirky English in my presence, but over time, they slipped more to using their own language, which is mostly fine with me. I've only chipped them once when we were at bakery seated at an outdoor table and they weren't speaking English. Guys, it's the three of us sitting here for brunch together, English please. It is weird how they switch from their language and English, talking together in English at times, and even to their parents on the phone. 

50 Common Words AI (and People) Mishear Across the English-Speaking World

April 30, 2025AI, LanguageLeave a comment

This post explores British and American pronunciation differences through the lens of AI speech recognition, offering new insight into how we speak and how machines listen.

As someone who teaches English phonetics in Singapore, I’m constantly navigating the subtle differences in pronunciation across accents. But nothing has opened my eyes to those differences quite like trying to get AI to understand them. Training language models has become a new lens, a strange and fascinating window, into how speech works, and where it breaks down. And although we take a deep dive into the research in this post, it’s important to appreciate how difficult this challenge really is—I know firsthand as a teacher.

You: “Set a timer for my next shed-jool.”
Siri: “Searching the web for… ‘shuttle?’”

From shed-jools to vitamins, even the smartest AIs struggle to keep up with how English is spoken around the world. The reason? Speech models aren’t trained on all English equally.

Speech AI now powers your Zoom meetings, call centers, captions, classrooms, and health apps. But these tools are overwhelmingly trained on standard American English and it shows. A Stanford-led study found that African-American speech had nearly double the word error rate (35%) compared to white American speech (19%). A separate global benchmark showed that accents from India, Britain, and France had up to 49% more errors compared to American-accented input.

Even OpenAI’s Whisper, one of the best available today, still performs better on U.S. English than on British or Australian. Meanwhile, platforms like Siri and Alexa have long struggled with Irish and Scottish accents, prompting users to change how they speak just to be understood.

This isn’t about funny mishearings, it’s about fairness, inclusion, education, and opportunity. When your accent isn’t recognized, your message often isn’t either.

And the systems aren’t being rude. They’re just undertrained.

Until models are exposed to a wider range of global speech, millions of users will keep getting subtly sidelined by systems that just don’t “hear” them.

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Why AI Still Trips Over Accents

Even today’s most advanced speech systems struggle to understand all accents equally well. Despite impressive improvements, multiple studies show consistent accent bias, particularly against non-American and non-standard dialects.

The Data: Bias in the Benchmarks

As mentioned above, a Stanford-led evaluation (Koenecke et al., 2020) of five major ASR systems—Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon, found that transcripts for African American Vernacular English had a 35% word error rate (WER), nearly double the 19% for white American speakers.

In a larger audit spanning 2,700 speakers across five continents, DiChristofano et al. (2023) found WER gaps ranging from 2–12% for non-American accents, translating to up to 49% relative error. Indian, French, and Southeast Asian-accented English were among the hardest hit.

Even among native speakers, bias persists. OpenAI’s Whisper performs far better on American English than on British or Australian varieties (Graham & Roll, 2024). UK studies show that “prestige” accents like Received Pronunciation are recognized more accurately than regional dialects (Markl, 2022).

Why It Happens

Most speech models are trained predominantly on American data. As a result, the burden of intelligibility often falls on the speaker not the system.

Speech recognition models work by breaking down audio into phonemes and matching them against statistical patterns. But those patterns reflect the training data. And when that data skews heavily toward a single accent, everyone else is left misheard.

Sound Patterns That Commonly Confuse AI

Certain phonetic shifts are especially tricky for ASR systems:

• /æ/ becomes /ɑː/ in words like advertisement, patent, and pasta. Vowel shifts are unevenly represented across training corpora.

• /aɪ/ vs. /ɪ/ in words like either, neither, and vitamin. Models often guess based on spelling alone, lacking contextual accent knowledge.

• Non-rhotic /r/ drops in British English words like parliament, wrath, and version, leading to alignment errors.

• /ʃ/ vs. /sk/ in schedule (shed-yool vs. sked-jool). This cluster confusion breaks decoder predictions.

• /ɪə/ vs. /ɛ/ in leisure and niche. American decoders often miss the glide.

• T-flapping vs. T-holding in tomato and route. American English flaps the /t/; British English pronounces it clearly—confusing the ASR.

These sound mismatches often trip up models in real-world use. For instance, schedule, vitamin, and mobile are common stumbling blocks for AI depending on whether it hears British or American pronunciation.

Anecdotal Proof from the Real World

This isn’t just theory. Users have long reported needing to “code-switch” or Americanize their speech just to be understood:

• Siri and Alexa had well-documented trouble with Scottish and Irish accents.

• Google Assistant often mishears British time phrases due to differences in /t/ pronunciation.

• Contact center pilots have shown customer satisfaction increases when using accent-neutralizing AI layers.

• Reddit users frequently report toggling between British and American spellings or pronunciations to get accurate results.

Until these solutions become standard, speech recognition remains biased. For teachers, students, and users with regional or global accents, the experience can still feel exclusionary. The irony is sharp: the AI that talks back still doesn’t always listen properly.

 

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The Ultimate British vs. American Pronunciation Table

What confuses humans also confuses machines. Below is a table of over 50 words with distinct British and American pronunciations, many of which AI often misunderstands, especially when the user’s accent doesn’t match its assumptions.

Word	🇺🇸 American	🇬🇧 British
Advertisement	AD-ver-tize-ment	ad-VER-tiss-ment
Adult	AD-ult	uh-DULT
Aluminium	a-LOO-min-um	al-yuh-MIN-ee-um
Amen	AY-men	Ah-men
Asia	AY-zhuh	AY-shuh
Bald	bold	bawld
Basil	BAY-suhl	BAH-suhl
Buddha	BOOD-uh	BUD-uh
Clique	clik	cleek
Crescent	CRES-uhnt	CREZ-uhnt
Data	DAY-tuh	DAH-tuh
Dynasty	DIE-nuh-stee	DIN-uh-stee
Either	ee-thur	eye-thur
Envelope	EN-vuh-lope	ON-vuh-lope
Esplanade	ES-pluh-nard	ES-pluh-nayd
Evolution	EH-vuh-loo-shun	EE-vuh-loo-shun
Expatriate	ex-SPAY-tree-ut	ex-SPAT-ri-ut
Falcon	FAL-kun	FOL-kun
Garage	guh-RAHZH	GA-ridge
Herb	ERB	HERB
Laboratory	LAB-ruh-tor-ee	luh-BOR-uh-tree
Leisure	LEE-zher	LEZH-uh
Medicine	MED-i-sin	MED-sin
Meter	MEE-ter	MEE-tuh
Mobile	MOH-buhl	MOH-bile
Missile	MISS-uhl	MISS-eye-ul
Neither	nee-thur	nigh-thur
Niche	nitch	neesh
Oregano	uh-REG-uh-no	or-uh-GAH-no
Often	OFF-en / OFF-tuhn	same
Parliament	PAR-luh-ment	PAR-li-ment
Pasta	PAR-stuh	PAS-tuh
Patent	PAT-uhnt	PAY-tuhnt
Patronise	PAY-truh-nize	PAT-ruh-nize
Privacy	PRAI-vuh-see	PRIV-uh-see
Produce (noun)	PROH-duce	PROD-juice
Progress (noun)	PROG-ress	PROH-gress
Project (noun)	PROJ-ect	PROH-ject
Route	ROWT	ROOT
Schedule	SKED-jool	SHED-jool
Scone	skohn	skon
Semi	SEM-eye	SEM-ee
Stance	stans	starns
Tomato	tuh-MAY-to	tuh-MAH-to
Vase	vays	varz
Vendor	VEN-door	VEN-duh
Version	VER-zhun	VER-shun
Vitamin	VAI-tuh-min	VIT-uh-min
Wrath	rath	roth
Yogurt	YOH-gurt	YOG-urt
Zebra	ZEE-bruh	ZEB-ruh

 

Royal Botanic Gardens

A month or so I met up with my friend Wombat after she had taken a tree tour of our Royal Botanic Gardens. The park is huge and so good, but it is built on the side of a hill, and as I no longer stride along, a bus conveniently dropped me at the lower part of the gardens near the cafe where we ate and drank coffee. 

We walked through the lower part of the gardens and then Alexandra Avenue to St Kilda Road but I did ask for a break along the way. It was further than I thought. 

It was a great catch up and here are a few photos. This is the Anderson Street Bridge over the Yarra River, with its now widened footpaths, blocked to vehicles aside from bicycles. I can remember driving across the bridge more than once in my car a few  decades ago.

Across the lake, once teaming with eels but where have they gone? You can boat on the lake in a punt propelled by someone in Edwardian costume. I think Ray and I did so many years ago.

A little romance in the gardens.

Birds in the shade.

Lilies and duckweed dominating the waters here.

We took a break here, at what I think were horse troughs. We worked out what all these pillars were for, but I can't remember. Horse tethering posts, I think. 

We had propped ourselves up on a rock or horse trough, and it was a slow dawning to me that we were sitting opposite two dykes, one of them breastfeeding a baby. 

After all that energy expended, my meal prepared by Phyllis was most welcome to replenish my fat reserves. 

I bought a new range hood today. It will be delivered and installed next week and the old one taken away. It is just a simple electrical fault with the old one, but it would be visit by a tradesperson, then the wait for the part, then the repair, to what I think is a 15 year old range hood. The original range hood went out with a very sparkly bang, rather like Boud's microwave has just done. I try to remember Ray's words, 'it's only money'. 

Enough, The Age

In its early days, Melbourne's The Age newspaper was a pompous and conservative broadsheet. Around the time I began reading and buying the newspaper each day, it has become quite adventurous with its reporting. Its sister Fairfax company paper The Sydney Morning Herald also caught up with modern times.

A late friend gave me lots of laughs when he referred to another gay couple who in the 90s rose from their slumbers and both sat at their respective desktop computers to read the electric newspapers. While I may have laughed, it wasn't too much later I was doing the same. Eventually the newspaper forced me to pay for access, and it is now about AU$1 a day for The Age but I also have access to The Sydney Morning Herald, the digital Brisbane Times and WAtoday (Western Australia Today). That's fine, and I am happy to pay this.

But, what I am not happy about is horribly intrusive advertising, not on the desktop version, but on the shortcut web link I have on my phone. As you are quickly scrolling through a story, advertising pops up and you can't smoothly scroll past it. I keep trying to scroll and end up at the end of the story and I have to backtrack. I've long has the app on my phone but for some reason I can't remember my link to the online newspaper worked better. It doesn't now. I went to try the app again and while my email address showed, it was shown that I was not a subscriber. There was nothing I could do to login.  As seems to be happening more often now, I deleted the app with my information and reinstalled it, and I was able to log in normally. So, I will see if this works better for than the overly intrusive advertising on the normal website available on phones. 

I won't even mention the battle I've had with the road toll company Linkt over the hoops I've had to jump, as I cancelled Ray's account and made my new one. I only did so because the electronic tag in the car to deduct toll money had stopped working. I stupidly mentioned that Ray had died and I was now the account holder. No you aren't, was the reply. He is dead. You need to set up a new account. Stop!!! I said I won't mention it. 

Things on the home front were fine until, "Andrewww, the cooking exhaust fan is not working". 

Lordy, Phyllis recently asked me rather cheekily what I do with the board they pay me. I told him it is not his business. They both think I am rich. Compared them, I suppose I am, but it really costs to live in the 'privileged'  western world. 

Bah, just two months ago I bought new LED lamps for the range hood. I will take them out and maybe they can be reused down the track. 

Monday Mural

Along with Sami and others, here is my not too great offering for Monday Mural. I think it is a commissioned work by the Elsternwick Hotel. I think...

The Elsternwick Hotel sits at the corner of Brighton Road and Glenhuntly Road and was built in 1854. It is a much changed building since then but some of the original must still he there. I've been there many times with the food average but very nice staff. 

The images just seem to be very random.

Sunday Selections

Along with Elephant's Child, River and others, here is my mix of photos this week.

Shortly into the new year we had a meal at this pub, up above the extremely busy Queens Way. Yes, I know it doesn't look busy but the cars come in a wave from the earlier traffic lights in five lanes in each direction with a tram in reserved track.

There were many young ladies in their skimpy summer finery at the hotel, far outnumbering men. I think some men may have scored a friendly female companion for the evening. We were ushered to a quieter area and the meal was fine and in the company Hairdresser Friend and a mutual male friend, we had a fine old time. We had walked from his flat across the Upton Road overpass and it was rather warm that evening.

It was then the question arose about men using urinals, which I think I might have mentioned before, or using cubicles just for peeing. I stated I use cubicles so I can dry off drips with toilet paper afterwards. I looked at Hairdresser Friend who gave the other gay guy a quizzical glance, and he said he did the same. Maybe it's a gay thing? Always being prepared for an encounter. I don't know.

Work of the adult children in the home.

A very successful pot of petunias from a proper plant nursery, unlike the less than grand pansies I now have, bought at the big green shed. Give your support to small local plant nurseries, not the huge hardware chain. 

Do you know what this is? I've seen a shoe scraper before but this takes it to another level. 

Interesting evening lighting.

On the south (Europe/America: north) side of this house and without any killer hot days, even in January the hydrangeas looked great, having avoided being fritzed. 

Somewhere or t'other. I always have to give them a stroke to feel their softness. 

This would be a rather unpruned crepe myrtle, I think. 

These are old photos as Ray was with me when we visited Hairdresser Friend's studio in an old industrial building. If you can't read it, and I assume the safe was English made, the company has supplied safes to City Safe (London?), Bombay, Maple & Co, Selfridges, Chancery Lane, Harrods, Cornhill, Westminster Trust, Hull and Belfast. 

The entrance to her photographic studio is very well protected by the heavy door. I didn't know the details of the building but here it is, https://www.artworksstkilda.com/ HDF told me the original purpose of the building but I've forgotten. I will check later.