Fillers

Um, uh, and the words people repeat while their next sentence loads.

A few are human and nobody notices them. They become a problem when they replace the pause — when every gap gets filled with sound instead of silence, which is more tiring to listen to than the silence would have been.

Zero does not always mean zero

This is the one number in your snapshot we ask you not to take at face value.

The transcription step is built to produce readable text, so it quietly removes most ums and uhs before we ever see them. That means a 0 can be either of two things:

• you really did not say any, or
• you said several and they were cleaned away before the count.

From where we stand, those two look identical. We would rather tell you that than show you a clean zero you might believe.

What we do not count as a filler

“Like” is not on our list, and that is deliberate. It is a legitimate word — “it looks like a market” — and the only way to tell a real like from a filler like is how it sounds, not how it is spelled. Flagging it from a transcript would mean accusing you of a mistake you did not make.

That is the rule everywhere in the snapshot: we would rather miss something than tell you that you did something wrong when you did not.