Why removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds

Linguists have a word for the ums, uhs, ers, and elongated versions (ummmm, uhhhhh) that pad spoken English: disfluencies.

I don’t record a lot of voice audio, but a few friends do, and they tell me editing those out by hand is miserable. So I built erm to do it.

That’s the whole interface for the common case. It writes a cleaned .wav and a JSON cut list next to the input. This post walks through how it works, because the obvious approach doesn’t sound very good and most of the code is the stuff that fixes that.