Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds

doug.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 96 posts

Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds

#21

Post by amelius »

wzdd wrote: post #10

It’s a nice engineering approach, but I’m interested in the motivation. Um and ah is distracting in a transcript, where you can naturally pause to take in information; in speech however it can serve as a focusing point to indicate the next part is important. See https://medium.com/better-humans/dont-worry-about-saying-um-... for example. The weirdly obsessive zeal that orgs like Toastmasters have about eliminating th…

As with all things ... Don't be opinionated and make it an option for the user.

Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds

#24

Post by chrismorgan »

I think the “What it won’t touch” section shows why the entire concept is unsound. Here it is with a different first sentence, and (other than the third sentence no longer matching erm’s reality) it’s perfectly coherent:

> It leaves um, uh, er and elongated versions (ummmm, uhhhhh) alone. Those sound like fillers but they’re doing real work in the sentence, and cutting them automatically would change what someone said. The rule erm follows: only remove things that are sound, not language.

> It also doesn’t touch repeated words, false starts, or long thinking pauses. Those aren’t noise on top of the speech; they are the speech, just messier than the speaker would like. Cleaning them up is an editorial decision about which take to keep, and erm doesn’t have an opinion about that.

Think about it. Cleaning these things-that-can-be-just-sounds-but-can-also-very-much-be-load-bearing up is an editorial decision. At the very least, you need to judge based on the surrounding content whether the removal of an um would change the meaning at all; and I don’t think text alone is adequate for that.

Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds

#25

Post by iib »

heroprotagonist wrote: post #9

Not to promote something, but Wispr Flow does that for me automatically if I trigger a setting for it.. While it's a commercial product with a subscription, I spent a long time on the free tier not even hitting their limits until I started using it so extensively that I wanted to pay for it. And I've used Whisper in the past, mostly for tinkering. I tried it for a couple of use cases but haven't touched the base proj…

Surprisingly, it's the whisper model itself that does that. I find that it's also good with false starts, often correcting something like: "uhm, we could...we can go there" to just "we can go there", if spoken rapidly enough.

Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds

#26

Post by venzaspa »

toast0 wrote: post #17
wzdd wrote: post #10

It’s a nice engineering approach, but I’m interested in the motivation. Um and ah is distracting in a transcript, where you can naturally pause to take in information; in speech however it can serve as a focusing point to indicate the next part is important. See https://medium.com/better-humans/dont-worry-about-saying-um-... for example. The weirdly obsessive zeal that orgs like Toastmasters have about eliminating th…

Having heard radio interviews with and without 'internal editing' to remove ums and ahs, most of the time I'd rather the edited version. It's more concise and focused, and I find it easier to comprehend. Too many ums and ahs and my mind wanders, and if it's radio, I can't go easily go back to try again. When I've listened to podcasts or audiobooks, I could never easily go back a little to try again either, and I gave…

It just goes to show that people have very different views. I think when I hear people thinking out loud (ums and ahs) it's a marker that they are actually engaging with the question, thinking through an answer and not bullshitting without thinking.

Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds

#27

Post by kaashif »

mrob wrote: post #18
wzdd wrote: post #10

It’s a nice engineering approach, but I’m interested in the motivation. Um and ah is distracting in a transcript, where you can naturally pause to take in information; in speech however it can serve as a focusing point to indicate the next part is important. See https://medium.com/better-humans/dont-worry-about-saying-um-... for example. The weirdly obsessive zeal that orgs like Toastmasters have about eliminating th…

>The weirdly obsessive zeal that orgs like Toastmasters have about eliminating them is weird. If you speak with disfluencies, you probably didn't sufficiently rehearse your speech. If you didn't rehearse enough, you probably didn't put much effort into writing it either, so why should I put much effort into listening? It's the same principle as AI slop.

Not necessarily true, more rehearsal isn't the key to fluent oratory.

Many people can speak off the cuff fluently and confidently, avoiding "like", "um", and other filler words. And even if you're not speaking fluently, leaving silences as punctuation is more effective, IMO.

Many impressive speakers I've met actually cite Toastmasters! So their obsessive zeal actually does work.

More rehearsal does work too sometimes, but it does sometimes lead to speeches "sounding too rehearsed".

Re: Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds

#28

Post by thaumasiotes »

chrismorgan wrote: post #24

I think the “What it won’t touch” section shows why the entire concept is unsound. Here it is with a different first sentence, and (other than the third sentence no longer matching erm’s reality) it’s perfectly coherent: > It leaves um , uh , er and elongated versions ( ummmm , uhhhhh ) alone. Those sound like fillers but they’re doing real work in the sentence, and cutting them automatically would change what someon…

>> It leaves um, uh, er and elongated versions (ummmm, uhhhhh) alone.

Something's already gone wrong here. Uh and er refer to the same sound. Uh is the American spelling. Er is British; to them a following "r" like that is just a kind of vowel.

Post reply on HN