Descript marks silent gaps in transcripts with dots. You can hide them with Ignore, delete them entirely, or use the AI "shorten word gaps" tool to automatically trim pauses longer than your threshold. At 5 seconds, it found 6.1-second gaps and shortened them to 2.5 seconds.
11
5 seconds
6.1 seconds
29
181
You'll notice on your transcript that Descript puts these dots in there alongside the words. So what are those? Those are silent areas. Either there's no speaking or there's indetectable speaking. Basically, it's something that Descript couldn't recognize. In order to transcribe as actual text, you can turn that off in your settings. You can go to View and then turn off whether or not those will display. But to just delete them, you can first of all use this ignore feature. When you highlight the dots like this, you can ignore it and it'll strike it out to let you maintain awareness that something was removed, but it is now gone from the video itself. You can also press delete on your keyboard and that'll remove the dots from the transcript as well as delete that portion from the video. The way to let underlord do this is to go to the top right. Underlord is all your AI stuff. And find this thing that says shorten word gaps. Click on that. And it found 11. And what it's looking for is gaps that are five seconds or more. So that's parts where there's five seconds of no speech detected. And as with the Filler Word removal tool, it displays all of those instances here on the right. And you can click on it and it'll play it. So you, you can confirm if there's no speaking there, there's nothing important. And that's a good thing to remove. If it's not, if you want to keep it, you can hover over the right side and there's the skip button and it'll ignore that particular instance of word gap. And then it goes to the second one. And then if I want to get rid of it, I can click this shorten button. And what that's going to do is shorten that 6.1 second gap. You see the 6.1? And in orange, it's going to shorten it to 2.5 seconds. And if I hit shorten, it's going to shorten just this one instance. So I hit shorten and now it's gone and it bumps me to the next one. So this is a 5.9 second gap. And I could change these parameters so I could have it. I could have it shorten it to one second, make it much, much shorter. And I could say shorten, and that shortened that instance. If I hit shorten all, it's going to shorten all the rest on this list. So let me go ahead and do that. And it says shorten eight word gaps. And again it's looking for five seconds or more of gaps. But I could change that to three seconds. And now it found 29 parts where there's three seconds or more of silence. Or if I bump it down to one second or more. Now there's 181. So a lot you can do with this. And that really helps speed up the editing process.
