How to remove filler words and dead air automatically on Mac

What counts as a filler word?

More than "um". A clean edit deals with every kind of hesitation, and treats each one differently:

The last row matters as much as the others. Take out every pause and a person stops sounding like a person.

Why not just cut every silence?

Because silence is not the problem; meaning is. A tool that removes every gap longer than a set length keeps a loud "um" and a false start, because neither is silent, and it cuts the breath in the middle of a thought, because it is.

On the ten-second demo take on Sharpy's home page, a 0.3-second silence threshold leaves 7.84 seconds with the stumble and the false start still in. Sharpy's cut runs 5.69 seconds and keeps the breath. How Sharpy decides where to cut goes through that take decision by decision.

How do you remove filler words and dead air on a Mac?

With Sharpy, from the raw recording to a clean render:

1. Add the recording. Any length: a two-minute short or a two-hour podcast.
2. Choose the format. A 60-second vertical clip is paced tighter than a long interview, and Sharpy cuts to match.
3. Let it read the recording. It goes through every word, pause and shot on your Mac, 1.7 times faster than real time.
4. Check the edit decision list. Every cut and trim is listed with its timecode and its reason, and the filler phrases it left for you are listed too.
5. Change what you disagree with. Ask it to keep a filler that matters or to leave a pause alone, in plain language, and it edits again.
6. Render and export. Before it renders, Sharpy asks how firmly you want dead air and stumbles dealt with, then checks its own render before you see it.

This is what those decisions look like:

How long does it take?

Less time than the recording takes to play. On the base Mac mini M4, Sharpy watches footage 1.7 times faster than real time, so it has been through a 30-minute recording in under 18 minutes, every word, pause and shot. There is nothing to upload first and nothing to download after. Once the recording is clean, captions follow its new timing.

How do you keep it sounding natural?

Leave the decisions about rhythm to something that can hear rhythm. Sharpy shortens each stretch of dead air to the tightest quarter of the speaker's own gaps between sentences, rather than to one length for everyone, so a slow, thoughtful speaker still sounds slow and thoughtful, only tighter. It never closes a gap completely, and it leaves alone the pauses that do a job: emphasis, a reveal, a change of topic.

Breaths get the same care. Sharpy tells a breath from a word by the sound itself, and it trims the edges of every cut so a breath is never dragged into the next word. And when the same line was read twice, it keeps the better take instead of stitching the two together.