The California Division of Workers' Compensation announced standards it will use for profile audit review of adjusting locations next year. The DWC said the PAR performance standard for 2025 audits is…

The Texas Division of Workers’ Compensation posted its audit plan for the fiscal year ending in 2025. The DWC said 2025 audits will focus on timely and accurate benefit payments, timely…

The Texas Division of Workers’ Compensation is accepting comments on the 2025 Medical Quality Review Annual Audit Plan through Nov. 22. The annual plan establishes priorities for the Medical Quality Review…

We all know the problem: the content is perfectly prepared, and everything is in place, but the moment you hit the record button, your brain freezes, and what pops out of your mouth is a rain of “ums”, “uhs”, and “mhs” that no listener would enjoy.
Cleaning up a record like that by manually cutting out every single filler word is a painstaking task.

So we heard your requests to automate the filler word removing task, started implementing it, and are now very happy to release our new Automatic Filler Cutter feature. See our Audio Examples and Usage Instructions below.

What is removed?

While the definition of filler words is not the same, depending on who you ask, some words can be used as filler as well as content. For example, “like”, “well”, “you know”, etc. cannot be removed without the risk of removing also content and destroying sentences, even if those words are used as filler words in some cases.

Therefore, we decided to focus on the removal of the obvious fillers, namely any kind of “ums”, “uhs”, “mhs”, German “ähm”, “äh”, “öh”, French “euh”, “euhm” and similar.

Audio Examples

1. English Male Speaker

The first audio example is an excerpt from the interview “From Racing Failure to Red Bull Champion: The Untold Christian Horner Story”. Our algorithm found and removed a remarkable ten filler words in this 45-second snippet:

Screenshot of the Auphonic Audio Inspector: each pale red shaded area corresponds to a cut-out filler word.

2. Austrian-German Female Speaker

The following example is an interview with the Austrian Ex-Foreign Minister, Karin Kneissl, who uses seven filler words within 26 seconds:

Usage Instructions

To use the Auphonic Automatic Filler Cutter feature, you just have to create a production or preset as you are used to and select “Cut Fillers” for “Automatic Cutting” in the section “Audio Algorithms”:

When your production is done, all cut-out filler words will appear as pale red shaded areas in the Auphonic Audio Inspector on the production status page, as you can see in the upper screenshot of the Audio Inspector.

If you want to remove silent segments from your audio as well, please also enable our Automatic Silence Cutting feature.

NOTE: Our Automatic Cutting features (for filler and silence) are not available for video files!

Behind the Scenes

For the training of our Automatic Filler Cutter AI-Algorithm, we created datasets that contain manually labeled audio files, collected from 'real world' audio data. So far, we have labeled, trained, and tested the system with English, German, Spanish, and French data.

However, in the Auphonic Web Service, you can activate and test the Automatic Filler Word Cutter for all languages. We would be very happy to hear how the filler removal works out for completely different-sounding languages from, e.g., the Asian, African, or Slavic language families.

Please send us feedback on any problems or error patterns you discover! This will help us generate specific data for the training to improve the algorithm and eliminate your problems.

Conclusion

Automatic filler word cutting is a powerful tool for podcasters looking to enhance the quality of their content. It boosts clarity and professionalism, all while making your editing process more efficient. Some users, however, see a touch of authenticity in filler words within podcasts. So, we leave it up to you to enable or disable the Automatic Filler Cutter feature for your next Auphonic production, depending on your desired style.

We are currently working on filler word cutting optimizations for more languages, so watch our channels to get all the news on our upgrades!

If you have any feedback for us – how the filler cutter is working in your language, what you do or don't like, what you miss, what else you would want to remove from your audio besides silence and filler words, etc. – you are welcome to contact us via email or directly comment on our production interface!

For those of you who like to be in control of every applied cut, we are introducing an update for our Automatic Silence and Filler Word Cutting Algorithms today: The export of Cut Lists allows you to import cuts into your favorite audio/video editor to check and apply the cuts to your files manually.
Thanks to your great feedback, we were able to update our “Filler Word Cutting” algorithm as well.

Cut Lists Export

We now provide the export of various formats of “Cut Lists” in the Auphonic Web Service.
You can use these formats to modify and apply cuts in your post production audio or video editing program:

Screenshot of the Reaper DAW with imported “ReaperRegions.csv”: pale red regions display filler words and pale gray regions mark silence.

To generate the cut lists, choose “Cut List (Filler and Silence)” in the “Output Files” section. By selecting the correct “Ending” you can export the cut lists to a format that is suitable for your post production audio or video editor:

We support regions and EDL (edit decision list) formats:

• Region formats (“AudacityRegions.txt”, “AuditionRegions.csv” and “ReaperRegions.csv”) list filler and silence cut regions with their respective start and end timestamps.
  You can import those cut region lists into your existing Audacity, Audition, or Reaper projects. There you can edit the cut positions to your liking by deleting, moving, or adding individual cut positions. After that, you may apply the cuts manually.
• EDL (edit decision list) formats, “SamplitudeReaper.edl”, “FinalCutProLegacy.xml”, “FinalCutProX.xml” and “DaVinciResolve.edl” (also known as “cmx3600” format and compatible with various editors), can be imported in your software to automatically apply cuts from the EDL file. Depending on the software you use, you may also edit individual cuts manually before applying them. Be aware though that in some editors it may not be possible to add them to an existing project. If this is the case, simply open a new project with the EDL file instead.

Please just let us know if we do not yet provide a cut list format for your favorite audio or video editing program!

Export Uncut Audio

To only detect fillers/silence but NOT cut them, choose the “Export Uncut Audio” mode for “Automatic Cutting” in “Audio Algorithms”. Then you can query cutting times via our API or select your favorite Cut List format as “Output File” to only export cut times for later editing, but without applying cuts during the Auphonic audio post production.

Using the option “Export Uncut Audio”, it is also possible to use our cutting algorithms for video productions. In this case, we will just detect and report cuts, and you can import and apply them in your favorite video editing program afterwards.

Filler Word Cutting Updates

Thanks to your great feedback, we've been able to further optimize our Automatic Filler Word Cutting algorithm.
By now you probably know that our filler word cutter removes all types of “uhm”, “uh”, “mh”, “ähm”, “euh”, “eh” and similar sounds. If you haven't heard about it yet, our release blog post might be a good starting point.

• Enhanced Fade Curves
  We noticed that due to reverb or background noise in input files, some filler cuts did not sound as smooth as they should have. To prevent such rough cuts, we trained our filler detection models with more diverse speech data and compared different fade curve approaches. Now the filler detection is much more robust against noise. Additionally, we developed an asymmetrical fade solution, which, in our opinion, makes the cuts almost inaudible.

  We nonetheless recommend, though, that you use filler cutting in combination with our Dynamic Denoising or Speech Isolation algorithms. These algorithms remove heavy reverb or noise and thus prevent noise artifacts during cutting.

• Handling of Affirmative Sounds
  Some of you were bothered by the fact that affirmative sounds, like “mhm”, “aha”, and “yeah” were cut along with filler words. Driven by your feedback, we tweaked our filler detection algorithm in a way that will remove considerably fewer of these sounds.

• Multitrack Filler Silencing
  We also received requests to optimize filler cutting for crosstalk in Multitrack productions.
  Let's assume that two speech tracks are simultaneously active and one of the two tracks contains a filler word. In this case, we can not cut the filler word in one track without destroying parts of the speech in the other track.
  Our original solution was to skip such a filler. Now, however, we replace it with silence instead. This removes the filler words while preserving all the speech content.

Feedback

If you want to provide us feedback on how you like the updated filler cutting algorithm or about any other features that are missing, you are very welcome to contact us. You can also leave a comment in the feedback section on the status page of your concrete production.

Does this scenario sound familiar? You’ve poured countless hours into creating something amazing—perhaps a product, website, artwork, or work presentation. With anticipation, you release it to the world, sharing it with your intended audience. Then… silence. No response, no engagement. It’s as if no one cares. Frustrated, you might find yourself enviously eyeing other creators, wondering how they manage to gain traction while your equally impressive work struggles for attention. You review your process, searching for mistakes, but find none. After all, you followed advice from experts, books, and industry gurus. You meticulously planned, designed, and executed your strategy. Moreover, you promoted extensively, creating accounts on every social platform and using all the right hashtags—yet still, crickets. So what’s the missing piece? Why are others succeeding where you’re not?While it’s tempting to blame factors like bigger budgets or larger teams, these aren’t the real culprits. Although such resources can be helpful, the true key to gaining traction is simpler: building an audience.Fortunately, I’m here to help. Let’s explore five crucial steps to effectively build and grow your audience: 1. Balance Creation and Promotion As creators, we often focus solely on producing content. However, to make a real impact, it’s essential...

The post Build Your Audience with These 5 Key Strategies first appeared on Chase Jarvis.

The post Build Your Audience with These 5 Key Strategies appeared first on Chase Jarvis.

Converting website visitors into subscribers may be even harder than getting traffic in the first place. The key to customer retention is the ability to grow an engaged audience. It’s a constant struggle to maintain interest, and if you can’t convert casual visitors into loyal customers you may as well close the virtual shutters. If you’re […]

Organizer: Government Finance Officers Association of British Columbia
Location: Online

ETSI virtual Security Week 2020: a record audience for first sessions

Sophia Antipolis, 12 June 2020

Register for next week.

Our virtual Security Week started this Monday, 8 June and will end on 19 June with nearly 50 speakers discussing the latest updates and challenges of four different key topics around cybersecurity in 14 webinars.

Read More...

ETSI workshop: improving Quality of Emerging Services for Speech and Audio

Sophia Antipolis, 23 November 2022

The ETSI STQ (Speech and multimedia Transmission Quality) Workshop that took place on 21-22 November 2022 in Bratislava (Slovakia) was hosted by Amazon. It focused on a user-centred perspective of the Quality of Emerging Services for Speech and Audio.

The event was attended by organizations providing a rich mix of inputs and perspectives from industry, regulators, and academia. Through presentations, discussions and professional networking, this STQ Workshop demonstrated a very high level of engagement by all participants, with stimulating interaction among all speakers and the audience.

Read More...

Toronto ─ On October 21, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), the Canadian Public Accountability Board (CPAB), and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) co-hosted the sixth annual Canadian Audit Quality Roundtable.

"It's been a year since the horrific events at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, and Charlie is just trying to move on. Even with the excitement of a new school and a fresh start, she's still haunted by nightmares of a masked murderer and four gruesome animatronic puppets. Charlie thinks her ordeal is over, but when a series of bodies are discovered near her school bearing wounds that are disturbingly familiar she finds herself drawn back into the world of her father's frightening creations. Something twisted is hunting Charlie, and this time if it finds her, it's not letting her go." -- Publisher's description.

When dealing with compliance regulations, each organization can face a variety of potential risks. Without having a full understanding of an organization’s risk exposure, critical systems and data will be at risk for attacks or data leakage. The Center for Internet Security (CIS) developed a series of best practice benchmarks for a variety of applications, operating systems, servers, and databases used within organizations today. Each benchmark contains recommended security settings designed to harden systems and applications from attack while maintaining overall system functionality. The components in these dashboards present a summary of results gathered from CIS compliance scans using the CIS Benchmarks.

Tenable has been certified by CIS to perform a wide variety of platform and application audits based on the best practice consensus benchmarks developed by CIS. Tenable submits example test cases for all of the criteria within each unique benchmark, and then submits our results to CIS personnel for official certification. Tenable has developed audit files based on the CIS Benchmarks tested on systems, and has been approved and certified by CIS staff members.

When performing managed scans with Tenable.sc, some CIS audits require additional patch audits and vulnerability checks. Any additional requirements for completing an audit using the CIS Benchmarks will be included within the audit file description text. In some cases, multiple scans may be required, as Tenable provides both Level 1 and Level 2 audit checks. Level 1 checks provide minimum settings recommendations, and are generally considered safe to apply to most systems. Level 2 checks include recommendations for complex or highly secure environments, and can lead to reduced functionality of systems within the network.

Information presented within these dashboards includes a summary of CIS audit checks currently supported by Tenable. Results will highlight one of three severity levels that will provide valuable information analysts can use to harden systems within the enterprise. The informational severity level is considered “Passed”, indicating that the configuration setting matches the expected result of the audit check. Results assigned a medium severity must be evaluated by an analyst to determine whether the results are accurate or not. When an audit check fails, the severity is set to high, indicating that the collected result and the expected result do not match. Each failure should be reviewed, fixed, and re-scanned to ensure that the system has been secured properly. Using these benchmarks will help to assess the effectiveness of existing security controls on systems, and provide the critical context needed to strengthen an organization's security posture.

If needed, audit files can be modified to an organization’s specific requirements. Additional information on how to edit audit files can be found within the “Nessus Compliance Checks” document in the Support Portal.

These dashboards are available in the Tenable.sc Feed, a comprehensive collection of dashboards, reports, Assurance Report Cards, and assets. The dashboards can be easily located in the Tenable.sc Feed under the category Compliance & Configuration Assessment. The dashboard requirements are:

• Tenable.sc 5.2.0
• Nessus 8.6.0
• CIS Audit Files
• Compliance Data

In order to maintain the overall security of systems and data within the enterprise, organizations must have an effective and repeatable way to measure compliance results. Tenable Tenable.sc helps organizations obtain results using the CIS Benchmarks by measuring compliance in real time, providing an accurate assessment of an organization’s security posture. By prioritizing remediation actions of misconfigured systems, the organization can maximize their investment in compliance reporting and system hardening efforts. With more supported technologies than any other vendor, Tenable assists organizations in obtaining the most comprehensive view of the network and the intelligence needed to assess and protect systems using CIS compliance standards.

There are 3 dashboards with over 40 individual components. As with all dashboards in Tenable.sc, individual components can be rearranged, edited, or removed to focus on the components of interest. To edit or delete a component, click on the Gear menu in the upper-right title area of a component and select the appropriate menu item. Components can be rearranged using drag and drop. To change the visual display of the entire dashboard, for example from 3 columns to 2 columns or 1 column, from the Options menu select Edit Dashboard and select a layout style.  

The following dashboards are available:

• CIS Audit Summary (Networking and Applications): This dashboard provides the components for application servers (Apache, MongoDB, Oracle, RDMS), networking or container based services (Cisco, Docker, Kubernetes, Palo Alto, VMwareESXi) and other similar benchmarks.
• CIS Audit Summary (Microsoft): This dashboard provides the components for all Microsoft benchmarks, including servers, workstation, and various other applications.  
• CIS Audit Summary (Linux Benchmarks): This dashboard provides the components for AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Amazon Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, HP-UX, macOS, NGINX, RedHat, SUSE, and other similar operating systems.

With AI-generated text-to-speech and translation options, Newsroom will reach new audiences while continuing to tell UCLA’s stories in bold new ways.

Charlie Clark was once auditing a company when a box of out-of-calibration gages fell from the ceiling.

What exactly is an audit? An audit is essentially a health check for your business processes. Picture a doctor’s visit, but for your company

As manufacturing and quality control becomes increasingly digital, auditing is increasingly enmeshed with technology and data analytics.

In today's competitive industrial landscape, adhering to quality management certification and audit standards is vital for consistency and excellence, especially in sectors like aviation and defense. These standards drive improvement and build customer trust. Understanding the audit process is crucial, as preparation varies by audit type, enabling organizations to effectively meet auditors' expectations.

The ongoing challenge for many companies is how to upgrade or integrate internal audit knowledge/competence and maybe cross train auditors for all the auditing schemes that your company is currently registered to or may be planning on expanding.

According to the AEA, nonresidential buildings consume more than half the building energy use in Alaska, and the majority of these buildings are privately owned. The Commercial Building Energy Audit program is designed to pay up to 75 percent of the cost of an ASHRAE level 1+ energy audit performed on privately owned commercial buildings.

Annual HFC inventory reports are required to be audited by a CPA to ensure compliance, and regulated entities should understand what to anticipate for the 2024 compliance period. 

AMERIPEN’s Dan Felton recently told a U.S. Senate committee that more data is needed to build consensus among industry, environmental, and government stakeholders in order to develop comprehensive packaging EPR policy.

Washington, D.C. -- PILOT, the innovation arm of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), today announced it is conducting a program with support of the Google News Initiative to improve direct-to-consumer audience engagement to better serve local audiences. The six-month program is designed to support broadcaster education as well as the implementation of first-party data and direct-to-consumer business models.

Washington, D.C.— The future of the film industry is more democratic. That’s the idea behind a Main Stage panel discussion at the 2024 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The team behind “Holy Smokes,” the winner of the Decentralized Pictures Kevin Smith Comedy Short Film Screenplay Award, will dive into the challenges aspiring filmmakers face and explore the groundbreaking shift towards audience-driven filmmaking. The panel features Decentralized Pictures (DCP) Co-founder Roman Coppola (“Moonrise Kingdom,” “The French Dispatch,” and “Darjeeling Limited”), and Actor Mena Suvari (“American Beauty,” “American Pie,” HBO’s “Six Feet Under”), followed by a screening of “Holy Smokes.”

Here is an old post that I found in my drafts folder. With my regional auditions coming up again here in a month I thought it would be relevant to go ahead with the post and try to get some ideas.

What do you do to help your students prepare for an audition?

Yesterday we had auditions for our Regional Honor Choir. I had 9 students qualify which is awesome considering I had 12 audition. I am not happy with my low numbers auditioning but that is a discussion for another day.

The audition is broke up into 2 different auditions. Sight Singing and a Solo. Both with different judges.

We just had our regional auditions and my students did very well. Today I had the idea to type out all the notes that they received from their auditions. This way I have a digital record for as long as I want and secondly I could put that into wordle.net and see what trends I noticed.


The Result

Room 30, Parliament Buildings

Room 21, Parliament Buildings

The expert panel at OTN Architect Day in Los Angeles responds to an audience question about cloud security and auditing.

DUSHANBE, 29 July 2016 – The OSCE Office in Tajikistan today donated audio-visual equipment to the Police Academy of Tajikistan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs with the aim of supporting the Academy’s lecturers to use interactive teaching techniques on the investigation of crimes related to the trafficking of human beings.

The equipment includes a computer, a projector, a screen, speakers, a printer, and an Uninterruptible Power Supply device (UPS). An external hard disk drive was also donated to allow for the storing of an electronic library of thematic video films and other informational resources in this field.

“This equipment will improve the teaching of the Course on Combating Trafficking in Human Beings, and will therefore enable the police to more effectively address this serious social problem,” said Fabio Piana, Deputy Head of the OSCE Office in Tajikistan.

Karim Soliev, the first Deputy Director of the Police Academy, thanked the OSCE for its continued support in building the capacity of future law enforcement staff and Police Academy cadets in combating human trafficking and domestic violence in Tajikistan. “This equipment is of great help to lecturers who will now be able to apply more interactive teaching techniques,” he said.

In previous years, the OSCE has provided expert support to the Police Academy, including the development of the Lecturer’s Guidelines on teaching this specialized and compulsory 20-hour course. The OSCE has also trained the team of lecturers on modern interactive teaching techniques and has recently updated the Course on Combating Trafficking in Human Beings with regard to new legislation in this field.

Related Stories

• Tajik Border Troops Officers complete OSCE patrol leadership course
• OSCE Office in Tajikistan support Garm’s local authorities in strengthening referral mechanisms for protecting domestic violence victims
• OSCE Office in Tajikistan’s training series highlights role of parents in the fight against terrorism

Parametric bitstream-based quality assessment of progressive download and adaptive audiovisual streaming services over reliable transport

Parametric bitstream-based quality assessment of progressive download and adaptive audiovisual streaming services over reliable transport - Video quality estimation module

Parametric bitstream-based quality assessment of progressive download and adaptive audiovisual streaming services over reliable transport

Parametric bitstream-based quality assessment of progressive download and adaptive audiovisual streaming services over reliable transport - Quality integration module