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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

I swear I did this once in school, to a teacher with a notoriously circuitous manner of speaking, by holding up my fingers and counting the filler words, and he slowly noticed it, became mildly horrified, and... fixed it, within about 6 weeks. Pretty impressive, I wonder what he did to change so quickly.

Originally he'd take 2 minutes to get through his name and phone number on a voicemail, and a few months later you wouldn't even recognize him by how clear and concise he was.

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Wonderful story but we must also acknowledge the teacher for going along with it so gracefully

All the credit is his, I was just a dumb little punk who didn't know better. Handling it gracefully and making such an astounding change in response.

With how great speech recognition is becoming, it seems like this is something remote workers could easily discreetly do since our conversations tend to be stationary, through a computer, and with only a small part of our body visible. Just wire up some electrodes to zap you every time the computer detects filler. I'm now seriously considering doing it myself.

One of our app devs built this recently, but for swearing:

https://youtube.com/shorts/FthRCwn1JuM?si=lC3eWAUI7sV-LL-r

A wearable speech coach would be awesome, though. Detect filler words and give you an alert on your HUD when it detects "uh" "uhm" etc.

Neat! Without the electrodes I don't think it would be effective for me for "uhh" / "uhm". Considering how unconscious filler words are, I think I'd need the immediate unignorable feedback. But you've got all the logic there, it just needs to be made more violent.

How should the speech coach stimulate you when it detects you using a particularly euphonously or impactfully?

It would be about as easy, and certainly less painful, to just have a video processor remove and smooth over filler words in real time.

If the filler words are excessive it would slow down the apparent rate of speech, but obviously not the real rate of speech, by definition, since we're only removing words with zero semantic value.

Why are filler words bad? Why do we need to be trained not to use them?

People in this thread point out that filler words make communication less effective, primarily by being distracting.

if you've got nothing to say, you're just adding noise.

Why do we care that much about the SNR of spoken words? Language is inherently quite redundant.

Redundancy is still "signal"

I don't think it's an argument of efficiency but rather the avoidance of noise.

The "ums" isn't redundant, it's not repeating or decorating the conversation. It's filler like static. Stops people from filling the gaps with their own thoughts

Your non-verbal communication sent the message.

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