Speak with Elegance (or not)

Sunday October 17, 2021

When we’re speaking, we have an overwhelming compulsion to fill ‘dead air’ with words. So, we tend to inject lots of ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’.

I noticed that YouTube automatically generates a transcript from videos. So, I saved a copy of the transcript from the recent lunch-n-learn I did for Smart Data, to see how I did.

I threw together a quick parser:

#!/usr/bin/python3
 
def word_check(line_to_check, word_to_check):
	current_count = 0
 
	if line_to_check.startswith(f"{word_to_check} "):
		current_count = current_count + 1
	if line_to_check.endswith(f" {word_to_check}"):
		current_count = current_count + 1
	current_count = current_count + line_to_check.count(f" {word_to_check} ")
 
	return current_count
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
	um_count = 0
	uh_count = 0
 
	with open("video_transcript.txt") as f:
		contents = f.readlines()
 
		for line in contents:
			line = line.strip()
 
			um_count = um_count + word_check(line, "um")
 
			uh_count = uh_count + word_check(line, "uh")
 
	print(f"You said 'um' {um_count} times")
	print(f"You said 'uh' {uh_count} times")

Then, I ran it against the transcript of my 90 minute talk. Bear in mind, I was pretty confident that I do a decent job of minding my ‘uhs’, and ‘ums’.

My results?

You said 'um' 31 times
You said 'uh' 165 times

Apparently, perception is not always reality. Who knew?