Remove the ums: filler words and dead air, in one sentence
How to remove filler words and silence from a video automatically, without clicking through the transcript one um at a time.
the_ums.movSearch any editing forum and the same thread titles repeat for a decade: how to remove the ums real quick, how to cut dead air without doing it manually, why does removing filler words take four hours. It is the most universal chore in talking-head video, and the most mechanical.
The old ways
- By hand: razor at every um. Accurate, soul-crushing, hours.
- Silence-detection plugins: good at gaps, blind to filler words, and every cut lands exactly at a threshold instead of where speech actually breathes.
- Transcript editors: click each highlighted um to delete it. Better, still one click per um, and the cuts can feel choppy because words do not end where waveforms do.
The sentence version
In klo you say: "cut the ums and the dead air." The agent reads the word-level transcript, finds the fillers and the silences, and makes the cuts in the natural gaps between words, never mid-syllable. Then it re-checks its own timeline for anything choppy and repairs it. A 40-minute recording typically comes back several minutes shorter, and it still sounds like you on a good day, not like a robot swallowing.
Two details matter. The cuts are real timeline cuts you can adjust by hand. And the pass is free: transcript work and cutting never use credits in klo, so cleaning up a video costs nothing.
Keep some of yourself
One craft note: a video with zero pauses is exhausting to watch. Tell klo the style you want: "keep the natural pauses, just lose the fillers" works, and so does "make it tight, podcast style." The agent edits to the brief, not to a threshold.
Get klo for Mac and say the sentence. First 10 asks free.
