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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

#91

Post by brunoborges »

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=…

The interesting thing here is that OpenAI likely has a layer that trims down videos exactly how you suggest, so they can still charge by the full length while costing less for them to actually process the content.

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

#92

Post by cbsmith »

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=…

That's an amusing perspective. I really struggle with watching any video at double speed, but I've never had trouble listening to any of his talks at 1x. To me, he seems to speak at a perfectly reasonable pace.

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

#93

Post by squigz »

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…

Out of curiosity, how might you improve those docs? They seem fairly reasonable to me

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

#94

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

timerol wrote: post #11

> Is It Accurate? > I don’t know—I didn’t watch it, lol. That was the whole point. And if that answer makes you uncomfortable, buckle-up for this future we're hurtling toward. Boy, howdy. This is a great bit of work, and the author accurately summarizes my discomfort

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.

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

#96

Post by swyx »

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=…

> I didn't look at all at the quality of the transcription by feeding it the shorter version.

guys how hard is it to toss both versions into like diffchecker or something haha youre just comparing text

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

#97

Post by bbatha »

cookingrobot wrote: post #88
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).

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.

I'm also a fast listener. I find audio quality is the main differentiator in my ability to listen quickly or not. A podcast recorded at high quality I can listen to at 3-4x (with silence trimmed) comfortably, the second someone calls in from their phone I'm getting every 4th word and often need to go down to 2x or less. Mumbly accents are also a driver of quality but not as much, then again I rarely have trouble understanding difficult accents IRL and almost never use subtitles on TV shows/youtube to better understand the speaker. Your mileage may vary.

I understand 4-6x speakers fairly well but don't enjoy listening at that pace. If I lose focus for a couple of seconds I effectively miss a paragraph of context and my brain can't fill in the missing details.

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

#98

Post by maxall4 »

janalsncm wrote: post #76
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…

> I wonder if there's a way to automatically detect how "fast" a person talks in an audio file Transcribe it locally using whisper and output tokens/sec?

Just count syllables per second by doing an FFT plus some basic analysis.

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

#99

Post by StochasticLi »

donkey_brains wrote: post #95

Hmm…doesn’t this technique effectively make the minute longer, not shorter? Because you can pack more speech into a minute of recording? Seems like making a minute shorter would be counterproductive.

No. You're paying for a minute of audio, which will be more packed with speech, not for how long it's being computed.

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

#100

Post by banana_giraffe »

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!

You can use yt-dlp to get the transcripts. For instance, to grab just the transcript of a video:

    ./yt-dlp --skip-download --write-sub --write-auto-sub --sub-lang en --sub-format json3
You can also feed the same command a playlist or channel URL and it'll run through and grab all the transcripts for each video in the playlist or channel.
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