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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

#201

Post by vayup »

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=…

Gemini charges by tokens rather than minutes. I used VAD to trim silence hoping token count will go down. I noticed the token count wasn't much different (Eg: 30 seconds of background noise had the same count as 2s of background noise). Either Gemini API trims silence under the hood, or the nature of tokenization is dependent on speech content rather than the length. Not sure which.

In either case, I bet OpenAI is doing the same optimization under the hood and keeping the savings for themselves.

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

#202

Post by CSMastermind »

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=…

> to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x

Is it common for people to watch Youtube sped up?

I've heard of people doing this for podcasts and audiobooks and never understood it all that much there. Just feels like 'skimming' a real book instead of actually reading it.

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

#203

Post by Feathercrown »

CSMastermind wrote: post #202
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=…

> to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x Is it common for people to watch Youtube sped up? I've heard of people doing this for podcasts and audiobooks and never understood it all that much there. Just feels like 'skimming' a real book instead of actually reading it.

Some people talk slower than your natural listening speed. It's less like skimming and more like if some books used 36pt font and you normalized the size back down to a comfortable information-dense size.

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

#204

Post by Eezee »

CSMastermind wrote: post #202
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=…

> to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x Is it common for people to watch Youtube sped up? I've heard of people doing this for podcasts and audiobooks and never understood it all that much there. Just feels like 'skimming' a real book instead of actually reading it.

That's completely different. Imagine you are reading a book and the words only get revealed to you at 1 word a second. You would get annoyed if your natural reading speed was higher than that.

Same with a video. A lot of people speak considerably slower than you could process the information they are conveying, so you speed it up. You still get the same content and are not skipping parts as you would when skimming a book.

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

#205

Post by keithxm23 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #202
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=…

> to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x Is it common for people to watch Youtube sped up? I've heard of people doing this for podcasts and audiobooks and never understood it all that much there. Just feels like 'skimming' a real book instead of actually reading it.

Often, I'll come across speakers who just speak slowly and listening at 1.5x or 2x barely feels sped-up.

Additionally, the brain tends to adjust to a faster talking speed very quickly. If I'm watching an average-paced person talk and speed them up by 2x, the first couple minutes of listening might be difficult and will require more intent-listening. However, the brain starts processing it as the new normal and it does not feel sped-up anymore. To the extent that if I go back to 1x, it feels like the speaker is way too slow.

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

#206

Post by godot »

If you're already doing local ffmpeg stuff (i.e. pretty involved with code and scripting already) you're only a couple of steps more away from just downloading the openai-whisper models (or even the faster-whisper models which runs about two times faster). Since this looks like personal usage and not building production quality code, you can use AI (e.g. Cursor) to write a script to run the whisper model inference in seconds.

Then there is no cost at all to run any length of audio. (since cost seems to be the primary factor of this article)

On my m1 mac laptop it takes me about 30 seconds to run it on a 3-minute audio file. I'm guessing for a 40 minute talk it takes about 5-10 minutes to run.

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

#208

Post by kristianbrigman »

dogprez wrote: post #196
jwrallie wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my own experience with whisper.cpp, normalizing the audio and removing silence not only shortens the process time significantly, but also increases a lot the quality of the transcription, as silence can mean hallucinations. You can do that graphically with Audacity too, if you do not want to deal with the command line. You also do not need any special hardware to run whisper.cpp, with the small model literally a…

Others pointed out the value of silence, but I just wanted to say it saddens me when humanity is misclassified as inefficiency. The other day Sam Altman made a jest about how much energy is wasted by people saying "thanks" to chatgpt. The corollary is how much human energy is wasted on humans saying thanks to each other. When making a judgement about inefficiency one is making a judgement on what is valuable, a very…

I’ll remember that you told me thanks. Will chatgpt? (Honestly curious… it’s possible)

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

#209

Post by Salgat »

kristianbrigman wrote: post #208
dogprez wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others pointed out the value of silence, but I just wanted to say it saddens me when humanity is misclassified as inefficiency. The other day Sam Altman made a jest about how much energy is wasted by people saying "thanks" to chatgpt. The corollary is how much human energy is wasted on humans saying thanks to each other. When making a judgement about inefficiency one is making a judgement on what is valuable, a very…

I’ll remember that you told me thanks. Will chatgpt? (Honestly curious… it’s possible)

I say thanks for my own well-being too.

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

#210

Post by 83 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #202
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=…

> to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x Is it common for people to watch Youtube sped up? I've heard of people doing this for podcasts and audiobooks and never understood it all that much there. Just feels like 'skimming' a real book instead of actually reading it.

>>Just feels like 'skimming' a real book instead of actually reading it.

That's the goal for me lately. I primarily use Youtube for technical assistance (where are the screws to adjust this carburetor?, how do I remove this brake hub?, etc). There used to be short 1 to 2m videos on this kind of stuff but nowadays I have to suffer through a 10-15 minute video with multiple ad breaks.

So now I always watch youtube at 2x speed while rapidly jumping the slider forward to find relevant portions.

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