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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

#81

Post by itsoktocry »

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?

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

#82

Post by munch117 »

narratives1 wrote: post #67
varispeed wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I use a Chrome extension that lets you take any video player (including embedded) to 10x speed. Turn most things to 3-4x. It works on ads too

I use a bookmarklet:

javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video,audio%22).playbackRate=parseFloat(prompt(%22Set%20the%20playback rate%22))}();

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

#83

Post by georgemandis »

karpathy wrote: post #65
georgemandis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha. Okay, okay... I will watch it now ;) (Thanks for your good sense of humor)

I like that your post deliberately gets to the point first and then (optionally) expands later, I think it's a good and generally underutilized format. I often advise people to structure their emails in the same way, e.g. first just cutting to the chase with the specific ask, then giving more context optionally below. It's not my intention to bloat information or delivery but I also don't super know how to follow thi…

I watched your talk. There are so many more interesting ideas in there that resonated with me that the summary (unsurprisingly) skipped over. I'm glad I watched it!

LLMs as the operating system, the way you interface with vibe-coding (smaller chunks) and the idea that maybe we haven't found the "GUI for AI" yet are all things I've pondered and discussed with people. You articulated them well.

I think some formats, like a talk, don't lend themselves easily to meaningful summaries. It's about giving the audience things to think about, to your point. It's the sum of storytelling that's more than the whole and why we still do it.

My post is, at the end of the day, really more about a neat trick to optimize transcriptions. This particular video might be a great example of why you may not always want to do that :)

Anyway, thanks for the time and thanks for the talk!

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

#84

Post by colechristensen »

rob wrote: post #78
colechristensen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a recent macbook you can run the same whisper model locally for free. People are really sleeping on how cheap the compute you own hardware for already is.

I don't. I have a MacBook Pro from 2019 with an Intel chip and 16 GB of memory. Pretty sure when I tried the large whisper model it took like 30 minutes to an hour to do something that took hardly any time via Groq. It's been a while though so maybe my times are off.

Ah, no, Apple silicon Mac required with a decent amount of memory. But this kind of machine has been very common (a mid to high range recent macbook) at all of my employers for a long time.

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

#85

Post by fragmede »

rob wrote: post #78
colechristensen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a recent macbook you can run the same whisper model locally for free. People are really sleeping on how cheap the compute you own hardware for already is.

I don't. I have a MacBook Pro from 2019 with an Intel chip and 16 GB of memory. Pretty sure when I tried the large whisper model it took like 30 minutes to an hour to do something that took hardly any time via Groq. It's been a while though so maybe my times are off.

It's been roughly six years since that MacBook was top of the line, so your times are definitely off.

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

#86

Post by hamburglar »

mrmuagi wrote: post #52
varispeed wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

All audiobooks are like this for me. I tried it for lectures but if I'm taking handwritten notes, I can't keep up my writing. I wonder if there is negative side effects of this though, do you notice when interacting with people who speak slower require a greater deal of patience?

I once attended a live talk by Leslie Lamport and as he talked, I had the overwhelming feeling that something was wrong, and was thinking “did he have a stroke or something?” but then I realized I had just always watched his lectures online and had become accustomed to listening to him at 2x.

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

#87

Post by ilyakaminsky »

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 :)

I've already done that [1]. A fraction of the price, 24-hour limit per file, and speedup tricks like the OP's are welcome. :)

[1] https://speechischeap.com

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

#88

Post by cookingrobot »

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).

There are fonts designed to be legibly at really small size. I wonder if there are voices that are especially understandable at extreme speeds.

Could use an “auctioneer” voice to playback text at 10x speed.

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

#89

Post by seabass »

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).

I made a super simplistic chrome extension for this. Doesn’t work on all websites, but YouTube and most online video courses are covered.

https://github.com/sebastiansandqvist/video-speed-extension

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

#90

Post by mrstone »

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…

> I wonder if there's a way to automatically detect how "fast" a person talks in an audio file.

Hilbert transform and FFT to get phoneme rate would work.

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