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”!

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toast0 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Having heard radio interviews with and without 'internal editing' to remove ums and ahs, most of the time I'd rather the edited version. It's more concise and focused, and I find it easier to comprehend. Too many ums and ahs and my mind wanders, and if it's radio, I can't go easily go back to try again. When I've listened to podcasts or audiobooks, I could never easily go back a little to try again either, and I gave up on them (even though I have some content I really want to listen to, it's too frustrating, so it's not happening). But I'm sure other people have different preferences.

I also don't care for writing that could have been made a lot more concise. It's a lot of work to make things shorter, but I think it's worthwhile.

	▲	venzaspa 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It just goes to show that people have very different views. I think when I hear people thinking out loud (ums and ahs) it's a marker that they are actually engaging with the question, thinking through an answer and not bullshitting without thinking.

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bluebarbet an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The most popular academic theory (IIRC) is that "um" and "uh" are conversational placeholders that say, "don't talk, I'm not finished speaking yet". Which obviously serves no purpose in a monologue.

To me they just indicate lack of confidence on the part of the speaker.

	▲	skrebbel an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There's a correlation between speaking with confidence and bullshitting / corner cutting. Hard, nuanced questions require more thinking time to produce a nuanced answer. But a bullshitter will just confidently answer subtly wrong stuff. But they won't say "uh"! Is that really better?

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NooneAtAll3 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> in speech however it can serve as a focusing point to indicate the next part is important

it's... exact opposite?

the main (attempted) use for ummms is to keep continuation of speech despite the pause. And the main complaint is exactly that it ruins the focus and doesn't give respite

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RobotToaster 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

It can be a focusing point when someone wants to highlight the deliberate use of euphemism, removing those would be, um, unwise.

Although that is probably the less common use.

	▲	latexr 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think you’re both right. But you’re right regarding writing and your parent comment is right regarding speech.

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siriaan 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Occasional ums and ahs are fine but when every other phrase starts with a long aaaaah it can be pretty unpleasant to listen to.

	▲	sans_souse 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So, if this project's source Audio were Beavis and Butthead, you would be enthused?

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amelius 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As with all things ... Don't be opinionated and make it an option for the user.

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mrob 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>The weirdly obsessive zeal that orgs like Toastmasters have about eliminating them is weird.

If you speak with disfluencies, you probably didn't sufficiently rehearse your speech. If you didn't rehearse enough, you probably didn't put much effort into writing it either, so why should I put much effort into listening? It's the same principle as AI slop.

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kaashif 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not necessarily true, more rehearsal isn't the key to fluent oratory.

Many people can speak off the cuff fluently and confidently, avoiding "like", "um", and other filler words. And even if you're not speaking fluently, leaving silences as punctuation is more effective, IMO.

Many impressive speakers I've met actually cite Toastmasters! So their obsessive zeal actually does work.

More rehearsal does work too sometimes, but it does sometimes lead to speeches "sounding too rehearsed".

	▲	cubefox 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Many people can speak off the cuff fluently and confidently, avoiding "like", "um", and other filler words. I don't the that's true, we usually just don't notice filler words in the same way we are surprised that people usually don't even talk in whole sentences, in contrast to written text or movies (which also use written text).