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OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

george.mand.is

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

#21

Post by vjerancrnjak »

fallinditch wrote: post #20

When extracting transcripts from YouTube videos, can anyone give advice on the best (cost effective, quick, accurate) way to do this? I'm confused because I read in various places that the YouTube API doesn't provide access to transcripts ... so how do all these YouTube transcript extractor services do it? I want to build my own YouTube summarizer app. Any advice and info on this topic greatly appreciated!

If YouTube placed autogenerated captions you can download them free of charge with yt-dlp.

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

#22

Post by georgemandis »

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.…

For what it's worth, I completely agree with you, for all the reasons you're saying. With talks in particular I think it's seldom about the raw content and ideas presented and more about the ancillary ideas they provoke and inspire, like you're describing.

There is just so much content out there. And context is everything. If the person sharing it had led with some specific ideas or thoughts I might have taken the time to watch and looked for those ideas. But in the context it was received—a quick link with no additional context—I really just wanted the "gist" to know what I was even potentially responding to.

In this case, for me, it was worth it. I can go back and decide if I want to watch it. Your comment has intrigued me so I very well might!

++ to "Slower is usually better for thinking"

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

#23

Post by w-m »

georgemandis wrote: post #19
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=…

Oooh fun! I had a feeling there was more ffmpeg wizardry I could be leaning into here. I'll have to try this later—thanks for the idea!

In the meantime I realized that the apad part is nonsensical - it pads the end of the stream, not at each silence-removed cut. I wanted to get angry at o3 for proposing this, but then I had a look at the silenceremove= documentation myself: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#silenceremove

Good god. You couldn't make that any more convoluted and hard-to-grasp if you wanted to. You gotta love ffmpeg!

I now think this might be a good solution:

    ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \
           -af "silenceremove=start_periods=1:stop_periods=-1:stop_duration=0.15:stop_threshold=-40dB:detection=rms" \
           -c:a aac -b:a 128k output.m4a -y

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

#26

Post by pragmatic »

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=…

No not really? The talk where he babbles about OSes and everyone is somehow impressed?

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

#29

Post by behnamoh »

bravesoul2 wrote: post #7
georgemandis wrote: post #2

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.

You could have kept quiet and started a cheaper than openai transcription business :)

Sure, but now the world is a better place because he shared something useful!

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

#30

Post by behnamoh »

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 (they mention x4 ruined the output; maybe for karpathy that would happen at x2).

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