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

doug.sh

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

#51

Post by [deleted] »

cubefox wrote: post #38
kaashif wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Many people can speak off the cuff fluently and confidently, avoiding "like", "um", and other filler words. I don't think that's true, we usually just don't notice filler words in the same way we are surprised that people usually don't even talk in whole sentences, in contrast to written text or movies (which also use written text).

[deleted]

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

#52

Post by fragmede »

...

No, you run an entire second pass LLM over the output of Whisper. "no uhhh three no four." should just output four the numeral not even f.o.u.r.

Hi, my name is fragmede. Judging by the date on my computer it's been four months since it's since I've t touched the transcription directory on computer and tried to improve on the state of wisprflow. Mines pretty good but it just doesn't... ah you can't drag me back in.

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

#53

Post by __mharrison__ »

Interesting. I make a bunch of video content and I went another way.

When I want to redo a section, I say it again. But, I have a magic word — "mistake" — that I insert before. Previously I transcribed and just removed the sentence (or section) before mistake.

I recently automated this and used AI to determine what to cut and to drive davinci resolve to make the edit. Saves a lot of time in my workflow.

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

#55

Post by doubled112 »

td6 wrote: post #42
venzaspa wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree to you, when it's in person. I think what your describing is mostly the beginning of an answer. Just randoms "um" inbetween because your struggling to build sentences can get annoying both in person and online

"Ummm, I think I agree with this description" vs "I, think, umm, I agree with, umm, this description"

The first one indicates something along the lines of "thinking, please stand by". The second one is a struggle.

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

#56

Post by ralferoo »

goalieca wrote: post #50
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 younger generation seems to love listening at 1.2x or faster. I think it’s a preference for a fast information dopamine hit. I may argue it’s even a shallow approach that prefers against pausing and time for careful reflection. Meanwhile, book reading is at an all time low seemingly because no one has a preference or patience for careful study and reflection.

I'm not in the younger generation, but I listen to most of youtube (apart from songs and comedy) at 2x speed, and wish it could be even faster most of the time (that's a feature of premium, but I'm not paying for that).

The problem is that people are producing longer videos because that earns them more advertising revenue. Many creators now speak so mind-numbingly slowly, that even at 2x speed it feels like it's about a normal presentation speed.

In almost all cases, even at 2x speed, it would be quicker to just read a transcript (if that was available). The problem is really that people are incentivised to make everything into at least a 10 minute youtube video, when a short blog post that could have taken only a minute to read would have been sufficient to convey all the same information, and probably more useful as you could easily refer back to specific sections if you wanted.

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

#57

Post by landl0rd »

goalieca wrote: post #50
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 younger generation seems to love listening at 1.2x or faster. I think it’s a preference for a fast information dopamine hit. I may argue it’s even a shallow approach that prefers against pausing and time for careful reflection. Meanwhile, book reading is at an all time low seemingly because no one has a preference or patience for careful study and reflection.

Podcasts and other media to which people often listen at faster speeds aren't produced with the professional fluency of a news broadcast from the fifties. The bitrate of information is relatively low. Of course many speed them up.

The democratization of media created a lot of folks who've no idea how to disseminate information in a structured format and at an optimal rate.

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

#58

Post by Retr0id »

slhck wrote: post #47

> Two small fixes, in order. First, each cut endpoint is allowed to slide a tiny bit (up to 60ms) to land in the quietest spot nearby. If there’s a momentary lull in the audio just before or after the original cut point, slide there. The slide is bounded so it can’t cross into a neighboring word, otherwise you’d chew off real speech. Second, from that quiet spot, the endpoint snaps to the nearest moment when the wave…

I call it claudeslop but I suppose claudish is slightly less inflammatory.

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

#59

Post by burkaman »

goalieca wrote: post #50
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 younger generation seems to love listening at 1.2x or faster. I think it’s a preference for a fast information dopamine hit. I may argue it’s even a shallow approach that prefers against pausing and time for careful reflection. Meanwhile, book reading is at an all time low seemingly because no one has a preference or patience for careful study and reflection.

I listen to podcasts and videos at 2x speed or faster, I can still understand everything and it brings listening time about equal to what my reading time would be if I were reading an article or transcript. Average reading speed is generally about twice as fast as average speaking speed, and in produced media people tend to speak even slower. I realize it sounds insane to hear 2x speed audio if you aren't used to it, but I promise if you were to ramp up the speed over a couple weeks or so, you would have absolutely no trouble with it. There's no need to if you don't want to, I'm just saying that your first impression is not giving you an accurate experience of what it's actually like.

For audiobooks I usually want to have time to hear and process every word, so I still speed it up but usually more like 1.5x, it depends on the narrator and the book. For podcasts I'm not there to appreciate the prose, so I go as fast as I can while still understanding them. I don't think it's about dopamine, I just find I don't gain anything by getting the same amount of information slower.

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

#60

Post by AaronAPU »

I accidentally learned how disgusting people’s mouth noises are while developing an audio leveler. The lip smacking and snot noises between sentences are the stuff of nightmares if you don’t do anything to exclude them from amplification.

The best approach I could come up with was to maintain a sliding histogram of loudness and exclude the low-level outliers.

You can do more in the noise/frequency domain but those were outside the scope of this tool.

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