OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

I was trying to summarize a 40-minute talk with OpenAI’s transcription API, but it was too long. So I sped it up with ffmpeg to fit within the 25-minute cap. It worked quite well (Up to 3x speeds) and was cheaper and faster, so I wrote about it.

Felt like a fun trick worth sharing. There’s a full script and cost breakdown.

would this also work for my video consisting of 10,000 PDFs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125598

There was a similar trick which worked with Gemini versions prior to Gemini 2.0: they charged a flat rate of 258 tokens for an image, and it turns out you could fit more than 258 tokens of text in an image of text and use that for a discount!

A point on skimming vs taking the time to read something properly.

I read a transcript + summary of that exact talk. I thought it was fine, but uninteresting, I moved on.

Later I saw it had been put on youtube and I was on the train, so I watched the whole thing at normal speed. I had a huge number of different ideas, thoughts and decisions, sparked by watching the whole thing.

This happens to me in other areas too. Watching a conference talk in person is far more useful to me than watching it online with other distractions. Watching it online is more useful again than reading a summary.

Going for a walk to think about something deeply beats a 10 minute session to "solve" the problem and forget it.

Slower is usually better for thinking.

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