OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

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=start_periods=1:start_duration=0:start_threshold=-50dB:\
                         stop_periods=-1:stop_duration=0.02:stop_threshold=-50dB,\
                         apad=pad_dur=0.02" \
      -c:a aac -b:a 128k output_minpause.m4a -y

will cut the talk down from 39m31s to 31m34s, by replacing any silence (with a -50dB threshold) longer than 20ms by a 20ms pause. And to keep with the spirit of your post, I measured only that the input file got shorter, I didn't look at all at the quality of the transcription by feeding it the shorter version.

From my own experience with whisper.cpp, normalizing the audio and removing silence not only shortens the process time significantly, but also increases a lot the quality of the transcription, as silence can mean hallucinations. You can do that graphically with Audacity too, if you do not want to deal with the command line. You also do not need any special hardware to run whisper.cpp, with the small model literally any computer should be able to do it if you can wait a bit (less than the audio length).

One half interesting / half depressing observation I made is that at my workplace any meeting recording I tried to transcribe in this way had its length reduced to almost 2/3 when cutting off the silence. Makes you think about the efficiency (or lack of it) of holding long(ish) meetings.

Others pointed out the value of silence, but I just wanted to say it saddens me when humanity is misclassified as inefficiency. The other day Sam Altman made a jest about how much energy is wasted by people saying "thanks" to chatgpt. The corollary is how much human energy is wasted on humans saying thanks to each other. When making a judgement about inefficiency one is making a judgement on what is valuable, a very biased judgement that isn't necessarily aligned with what makes us thrive. =) (<-- a wasteful smiley)