OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#121

Post by noahjk » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 12:11 AM UTC

nickjj wrote: post #119

w-m wrote: post #13

With transcribing a talk by Andrej, you already picked the most challenging case possible, speed-wise. His natural talking speed is already >=1.5x that of a normal human. One of the people you absolutely have to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x when listening to follow what's going on. In the idea of making more of an OpenAI minute, don't send it any silence. E.g. ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \ -af "silenceremove=…

Andrej's talk seemed normal to listen at 2x but I've also listened to everything at 2x for a long time. Unfortunately a byproduct of listening to everything at 2x is I've had a number of folks say they have to watch my videos at 0.75x but even when I play back my own videos it feels painfully slow unless it's 2x. For reference I've always found John Carmack's pacing perfect / natural and watchable at 2x too. A recent…

To me you talk at what I would consider "1.2x" of podcast speed (which to me is a decent average measure of spoken word speed - I usually do 1.5x on all podcasts). You're definitely still in the normal distribution for tech YouTubers, in my experience - in fact it feels like a lot of tech YouTube talks like they've had a bit too much adderall, but you don't come off that way. Naturally people may choose to slow down tutorials, because the person giving the tutorial can never truly understand what someone learning would or wouldn't understand. So overall I think your speed is totally fine! Also, very timely video, I was interested in the exact topic, so I'm happy I found this.

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#122

Post by cprayingmantis » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 12:33 AM UTC

I noticed something similar with images as inputs to Claude, you can scale down the images and still get good outputs. There is an accuracy drop off at a certain point but the token savings are worth doing a little tuning there.

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#123

Post by LanceH » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 12:38 AM UTC

hooverd wrote: post #18

pluc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously this is bonkers to me. I, like many hackers, hated school because they just threw one-size-fits-all knowledge at you and here we are, paying for the privilege to have that in every facet of our lives. Reading is a pleasure. Watching a lecture or a talk and feeling the pieces fall into place is great. Having your brain work out the meaning of things is surely something that defines us as a species. We're wil…

If you're not listening to summaries of different audiobooks at 2x speed in each ear you're not contentmaxing.

Read the title and go.

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#124

Post by SavioMak » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 12:42 AM UTC

nickjj wrote: post #119

w-m wrote: post #13

With transcribing a talk by Andrej, you already picked the most challenging case possible, speed-wise. His natural talking speed is already >=1.5x that of a normal human. One of the people you absolutely have to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x when listening to follow what's going on. In the idea of making more of an OpenAI minute, don't send it any silence. E.g. ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \ -af "silenceremove=…

Andrej's talk seemed normal to listen at 2x but I've also listened to everything at 2x for a long time. Unfortunately a byproduct of listening to everything at 2x is I've had a number of folks say they have to watch my videos at 0.75x but even when I play back my own videos it feels painfully slow unless it's 2x. For reference I've always found John Carmack's pacing perfect / natural and watchable at 2x too. A recent…

Yeah, you sound around 1.25-1.5x than the average videos I watch

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#125

Post by meerab » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 12:43 AM UTC

Interesting approach to transcript generation!

I'm implementing a similar workflow for VideoToBe.com

My Current Pipeline:

Media Extraction - yt-dlp for reliable video/audio downloads Local Transcription - OpenAI Whisper running on my own hardware (no API costs) Storage & UI - Transcripts stored in S3 with a custom web interface for viewing

Y Combinator playlist https://videotobe.com/play/playlist/ycombinator

and Andrej's talk is https://videotobe.com/play/youtube/LCEmiRjPEtQ

After reading your blog post, I will be testing effect on speeding audio for locally-hosted Whisper models. Running Whisper locally eliminates the ongoing cost concerns since my infrastructure is already a sunk cost. Speeding audio could be an interesting performance enhancement to explore!

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#126

Post by LanceH » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 12:46 AM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #81

heeton wrote: post #8

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.…

> Slower is usually better for thinking. Yeah, I see people talking about listening to podcasts or audiobooks on 2x or 3x. Sometimes I set mine to 0.8x. I find you get time to absorb and think. Am I an outlier?

Depends on what you're listening to. If it's a recap of something and you're just looking for the answer to "what happened?", that can be fine for 2x. If you're getting into the "why?" maybe slower is better. Or if there are a lot of players involved.

I'm trying to imagine listening to War and Peace faster. On the one hand, there are a lot of threads and people to keep track of (I had a notepad of who is who). On the other hand, having the stories compressed in time might help remember what was going on with a character when finally returning to them.

Listening to something like Dune quickly, someone might come out only thinking of the main political thrusts, and the action, without building that same world in their mind they would if read slower.

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#127

Post by WalterSear » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 12:54 AM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #30

w-m wrote: post #13

With transcribing a talk by Andrej, you already picked the most challenging case possible, speed-wise. His natural talking speed is already >=1.5x that of a normal human. One of the people you absolutely have to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x when listening to follow what's going on. In the idea of making more of an OpenAI minute, don't send it any silence. E.g. ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \ -af "silenceremove=…

> His natural talking speed is already >=1.5x that of a normal human. One of the people you absolutely have to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x when listening to follow what's going on. I wonder if there's a way to automatically detect how "fast" a person talks in an audio file. I know it's subjective and different people talk at different paces in an audio, but it'd be cool to kinda know when OP's trick fails…

Better: just make everyone in the video speak at my comfortable speed.

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#128

Post by trashchomper » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 12:54 AM UTC

TimorousBestie wrote: post #106

swyx wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't look at all at the quality of the transcription by feeding it the shorter version. guys how hard is it to toss both versions into like diffchecker or something haha youre just comparing text

Why use diffchecker when there’s a perfectly good LLM you could ask right there? lol

Assuming sarcasm but if not, because deterministic vs. nondeterministic output?

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#129

Post by viraptor » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 12:55 AM UTC

nickjj wrote: post #119

w-m wrote: post #13

With transcribing a talk by Andrej, you already picked the most challenging case possible, speed-wise. His natural talking speed is already >=1.5x that of a normal human. One of the people you absolutely have to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x when listening to follow what's going on. In the idea of making more of an OpenAI minute, don't send it any silence. E.g. ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \ -af "silenceremove=…

Andrej's talk seemed normal to listen at 2x but I've also listened to everything at 2x for a long time. Unfortunately a byproduct of listening to everything at 2x is I've had a number of folks say they have to watch my videos at 0.75x but even when I play back my own videos it feels painfully slow unless it's 2x. For reference I've always found John Carmack's pacing perfect / natural and watchable at 2x too. A recent…

> Andrej's talk seemed normal to listen at 2x but I've also listened to everything at 2x for a long time.

We get used to higher speeds when we consume a lot of content that way. Have you heard the systems used by experienced blind people? I cannot even understand the words in them, but months of training would probably fix that.

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#130

Post by MaxDPS » Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 1:09 AM UTC

mt_ wrote: post #115

You can just dump the youtube link video in Google AI studio and ask it to transcribe the video with speaker labels and even ask it it to add useful visual clues, because the model is multimodal for video too.

Can I ask what you mean by “useful visual clues”?