Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

george.mand.is

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 234 posts

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

#41

Post by mutagen »

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.…

Not to discount slower speeds for thinking but I wonder if there is also value in dipping into a talk or a subject and then revisiting (re-watching) with the time to ponder on the thoughts a little more deeply.

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

#43

Post by conradev »

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.…

Was it the speed or the additional information vended by the audio and video? If someone is a compelling speaker, the same message will be way more effective in an audiovisual format. The audio has emphasis on certain parts of the content, for example, which is missing from the transcript or summary entirely. Video has gestural and facial cues, also often utilized to make a point.

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

#44

Post by rob »

georgemandis wrote: post #39
rob wrote: post #33

For anybody trying to do this in bulk, instead of using OpenAI's whisper via their API, you can also use Groq [0] which is much cheaper: [0] https://groq.com/pricing/ Groq is ~$0.02/hr with distil-large-v3, or ~$0.04/hr with whisper-large-v3-turbo. I believe OpenAI comes out to like ~$0.36/hr. We do this internally with our tool that automatically transcribes local government council meetings right when they get uplo…

Interesting! At $0.02 to $0.04 an hour I don't suspect you've been hunting for optimizations, but I wonder if this "speed up the audio" trick would save you even more. > We do this internally with our tool that automatically transcribes local government council meetings right when they get uploaded to YouTube Doesn't YouTube do this for you automatically these days within a day or so?

> Doesn't YouTube do this for you automatically these days within a day or so?

Oh yeah, we do a check first and use youtube-transcript-api if there's an automatic one available:

https://github.com/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api

The tool usually detects them within like ~5 mins of being uploaded though, so usually none are available yet. Then it'll send the summaries to our internal Slack channel for our editors, in case there's anything interesting to 'follow up on' from the meeting.

Probably would be a good idea to add a delay to it and wait for the automatic ones though :)

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

#45

Post by tass »

mutagen wrote: post #41
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.…

Not to discount slower speeds for thinking but I wonder if there is also value in dipping into a talk or a subject and then revisiting (re-watching) with the time to ponder on the thoughts a little more deeply.

This is similar to strategies in “how to read a book” (Adler).

By understanding the outline and themes of a book (or lecture, I suppose), it makes it easier to piece together thoughts as you delve deeper into the full content.

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

#46

Post by 55555 »

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 example - I apologize that it's not in English. I don't know if this issue affects English. https://pastebin.com/raw/LTBps80F

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

#47

Post by isaacremuant »

pluc wrote: post #15
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.…

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…

> We're willingly heading for such stupidity, I don't get it. I don't get how we can all be so blind at what this is going to create.

Your doomerism and superiority doesn't follow from your initial "I like many hackers don't like one size fits all".

This is literally offering you MANY sizes and you have the freedom to choose. Somehow you're pretending pushed down uniformity.

Consume it however you want and come up with actual criticisms next time?

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

#48

Post by varispeed »

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…

It's a shame platforms don't generally support speeds greater than 2x. One of my "superpowers" or a curse is that I cannot stand normal speaking pace. When I watch lectures, I always go for maximum speed and that still is too slow for me. I wish platforms have included 4x but done properly (with minimal artefacts).

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

#49

Post by snickerdoodle12 »

w-m wrote: post #23
georgemandis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I love ffmpeg but the documentation is often close to incomprehensible.

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

#50

Post by lofaszvanitt »

varispeed wrote: post #48
behnamoh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's a shame platforms don't generally support speeds greater than 2x. One of my "superpowers" or a curse is that I cannot stand normal speaking pace. When I watch lectures, I always go for maximum speed and that still is too slow for me. I wish platforms have included 4x but done properly (with minimal artefacts).

Robot in a human body identified :D.
Post reply on HN