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OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

george.mand.is

141–150 of 234 posts

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

#141
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if human-generated transcriptions of audio ever came with guarantees of accuracy? This kind of transformation has always come with flaws, and I think that will continue to be expected implicitly. Far more worrying is the public's trust in _interpretations_ and claims of _fact_ produced by gen AI services, or at least the popular idea that "AI" is more trustworthy/unbiased than humans, journalists, experts, etc.

at least human-generated transcriptions have entities that we can hold responsible for...

That still holds true for gen-AI. Organisations that provide transcription services can’t offload responsibility to a language model any more than they can to steno keyboard manufacturers.

If you are the one feeding content to a model then you are that responsible entity.

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

#143
post #119
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…

James Goodnight of SAS Institute:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Goodnight

I have watched one or two videos of his, and he spoke slowly, compared to the average person. I liked that. It sounded good.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was a 2.25x YouTube option for "normal" humans. I already use every shortcut, and listen at 2x 90% of the time. But Andrej I can't take faster than 1.25x

YouTube ran an experiment with up to 4x playback on mobile (???) but it went away in February. I get a lot of the experiments they do being experiments but why just allowing the slider to go farther is such a back and forth hoopla is beyond me. It's one of the oft touted features of 3rd party apps and extensions with nearly 0 UI impact to those who don't want to use it (just don't slide the slider past 2x if you don'…

As a premium subscriber I currently have 4x available on Android and they recently (in the last month) added it to web too

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not sarcasm, just a little joke. I thought the emote at the end would prevent it from being taken seriously. . .

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

#146
post #119
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…

Your video sounded a tad fast at 2x and pretty fine at 1.5.

Now I think speed adjustment come less from the natural speaking pace of the person than the subject matter.

I'm thinking of a channel like Accented Cinema (https://youtu.be/hfruMPONaYg), with a slowish talking pace, but as there's all the visual part going on at all times, it actually doesn't feel slow to my ear.

I felt the same for videos explaining concept I have no familiarity with, so I see as how fast the brain can process the info, less than the talking speed per se.

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

#147

This is great, thank you for sharing. I work on these APIs at OpenAI, it's a surprise to me that it still works reasonably well at 2/3x speed, but on the other hand for phone channels we get 8khz audio that is upsampled to 24khz for the model and it still works well. Note there's probably a measurable decrease in transcription accuracy that worsens as you deviate from 1x speed. Also we really need to support bigger/l…

I kind of want to take a more proper poke at this but focus more one summarization accuracy over word-for-word accuracy, though I see the value in both.

I'm actually curious, if I run transcriptions back-to-back-to-back on the exact same audio, how much variance should I expect?

Maybe I'll try three approaches:

- A straight diff comparison (I know a lot of people are calling for this, but I really think this is less useful than it sounds)

- A "variance within the modal" test running it multiple times against the same audio, tracking how much it varies between runs

- An LLM analysis assessing if the primary points from a talk were captured and summarized at 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x runs (I think this is far more useful and interesting)

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

#148
post #46

This seems like a good place for me to complain about the fact that the automatically generated subtitle files Youtube creates are horribly malformed. Every sentence is repeated twice. In many subtitle files, the subtitle timestamp ranges overlap one another while also repeating every sentence twice in two different ranges. It's absolutely bizarre and has been like this for years or possibly forever. Here's an exampl…

Seems like Thai. Thai translation and recognition is like 10 years ago comparing to other languages I'm dealing with in my everyday life. Good news tho is the same level was for Russian years ago, and now it is near perfect.

Well the weird thing is honestly their speech to text recognizes 97% of words correctly. The subtitle content is pretty perfect. It’s just the formatting that’s awful.

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

#149
post #28

Why would you give up your privacy by sending what interests you to OpenAI when whisper doesn't need that much computer in the first place? With faster-whisper (int8, batch=8) you can transcripe 13 minutes of audio in 51 seconds on CPU .

I am a blue collar electrician. Not a coder (but definitely geeky).

Whisper works quite well on Apple Silicon with simple drag/drop install (i.e. no terminal commands). Program is free; you can get an M4 mini for ~$550; don't see how an online platform can even compete with this, except for one-off customers (i.e. not great repeat customers).

We used it to transcribe ddaayyss of audio microcassettes which my mother had made during her lifetime. Whisper.app even transcribed a few hours that are difficult to comprehend as a human listener. It is VERY fast.

I've used the text to search for timestamps worth listening to, skipping most dead-space (e.g. she made most while driving, in a stream of not-always-focused consciousness).

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

#150
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=…

I wish there was a 2.25x YouTube option for "normal" humans. I already use every shortcut, and listen at 2x 90% of the time. But Andrej I can't take faster than 1.25x

Install this: https://mybrowseraddon.com/video-speed-control.html

I listen to a lot of videos on 3 or even 4x.

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