It’s a nice engineering approach, but I’m interested in the motivation. Um and ah is distracting in a transcript, where you can naturally pause to take in information; in speech however it can serve as a focusing point to indicate the next part is important. See https://medium.com/better-humans/dont-worry-about-saying-um-... for example. The weirdly obsessive zeal that orgs like Toastmasters have about eliminating them is weird.

Disfluencies aren’t necessarily bad even if the word starts with “dis”!

I wonder if with enough input data and transcription you could “fingerprint” where a speaker personality has habits of interjecting “ums” leading to more hardy analysis. Novel approach, but gets me thinking

I think the “What it won’t touch” section shows why the entire concept is unsound. Here it is with a different first sentence, and (other than the third sentence no longer matching erm’s reality) it’s perfectly coherent:

> It leaves um, uh, er and elongated versions (ummmm, uhhhhh) alone. Those sound like fillers but they’re doing real work in the sentence, and cutting them automatically would change what someone said. The rule erm follows: only remove things that are sound, not language.

> It also doesn’t touch repeated words, false starts, or long thinking pauses. Those aren’t noise on top of the speech; they are the speech, just messier than the speaker would like. Cleaning them up is an editorial decision about which take to keep, and erm doesn’t have an opinion about that.

Think about it. Cleaning these things-that-can-be-just-sounds-but-can-also-very-much-be-load-bearing up is an editorial decision. At the very least, you need to judge based on the surrounding content whether the removal of an um would change the meaning at all; and I don’t think text alone is adequate for that.

Not to promote something, but Wispr Flow does that for me automatically if I trigger a setting for it..

While it's a commercial product with a subscription, I spent a long time on the free tier not even hitting their limits until I started using it so extensively that I wanted to pay for it.

And I've used Whisper in the past, mostly for tinkering. I tried it for a couple of use cases but haven't touched the base project in a while. But I do regularly use Faster-Whisper-XXL, an open source project based on Whisper, for subtitle generation.

Though, for subtitle generation, I decided to support the project and mainly use the non-public build of Faster-Whisper-XXL Pro built for donators to the open source project.

The extra features smooth out the subtitle editing process very substantially. Toss in "--roformer_overlap 0.125 --roformer_vram 16 --best_of 15 --ff_vocal_extract mb-roformer --vad_method pyannote_v3" to the cli parameters (and sometimes --realign) and you have much less work to do in SubtitleEdit or Tero Subtitler afterwards to clean it up.

This approach seems kind of backwards to me. Why try to detect everything except the thing you're trying to remove instead of either sampling a few uhs and ums and treating them as noise to be silenced (with a sharp crossfade to the noise floor that doesn't interrupt speech flow) or finetuning a model to detect them specifically for full automation?

It takes about 30 seconds in Audacity and will give an infinitely better result. Also works on any other sound

What a very cool utility.

This is fascinating! I'm going to try this on a certain clip from Jurassic Park.

This is great, I've tried out automated podcast editing tools before and they cut too aggressively in my experience. What are you thinking about doing next with this now that you've gotten the alignment snapping working cleanly for 'um' and 'ah', are you thinking of expanding the tool?

I would love to see support for videos and removal of custom filler words (I say 'basically' and 'like' a lot and have so far failed to improve myself on this).

What an awesome tool and idea. I’d be keen to see if it can integrate with video editing tools.

Ideally it would slice the video in the timeline without actually removing anything, so you can scrub through your video and try with and without each disfluency (thank you - awesome word) & decide case by case which to keep!

BTW, any recommendations for AI tools that remove the laugh track? I don't even mind the awkward acting without the missing laughter.

there is a aah counter in toast master !! this is the software that helps !!

I think it is harder to remove those from your own speech. I have been doing that for few months now and I still get back at it when I am in hurry or stressed.

Really cool stuff and definitely going to try it; I’m also finding it wild that Google put effort into adding ums and erms into their text to speech model a while back. AI puts it in, AI helps take it out.

Disfluencies are not necessarily "filler". They can convey mood or hesitation. Cutting them can change the meaning.

A trivial example is "umm... well... (sigh) okay" versus just "okay". Not okay!

This post is mostly about how surprisingly hard it is to cut filler words out of speech cleanly. Apparently, stripping ums isn't a find and replace type thing, because Whisper's timestamps are off by up to a few hundred ms and cutting on them chops syllables or leaves stutters. So, I built a tool, erm, that starts from Whisper's guess, finds where each word actually starts and stops in the audio, and snaps the cuts to silence so there's no click, with ffmpeg doing the splicing.

https://github.com/dougcalobrisi/erm