Ross Zeiger shows why Descript's built-in AI clip tools often fail and how to build better ones in Underlord instead. Write a plain-English prompt to delete specific filler words and silence gaps longer than one second, then save it as a reusable template. You get full control over which AI model runs the job.
On this morning's group coaching call, one of the students mentioned that she always gets really bad results with the AI tool that creates clips. I'm going to show you how I create my own custom-made AI tools using Underlord. So with all of the AI tools that you can access with the button right here, the AI tools, these are what I call narrow-purpose tools and they're opinionated. So what does that mean? It means they have a preset level of programming behind them, so they give you less control of how they function. For example, if I go to remove filler words and I click on find all filler words, and then I click on all filler words, which is the default behavior that it looks for all filler words, and the ones it's looking for are the ones on this list, which is fine. That covers the vast majority of use cases. And you can also have it, you know, do delete, delete and ignore, et cetera. What I do is I make my own customized tools to replace those and do better than those using Underlord. So if you come down to Underlord, you can tell it in plain English what you want it to do. So for example, I told it, go through this project and find all the times the speaker says there's a. And ignore them. Also remove all gaps without speaking of 1 second or longer and delete them. So ignore in this case is not don't look at them at all. That is an actual term that Descript uses for the crossout where it puts a strikethrough on your transcript and grays it out, but it removes it from the video. And then I'm demonstrating this with there's a, because that's things that I said in the video, but it's not a true filler word. That the Descript filler word would remove, just as matter of demonstration. Now, another thing is you can choose your favorite AI model here, whereas with the narrow purpose filler word removal, you don't get to choose a tool. So you might find that Opus does a really good job, which I find it does. That's why I use it. And it does better than whatever Descript is choosing to use behind the scenes. So that's another reason why you should do this. And let's go ahead and hit submit. And it's working. It says it found 40 matches. There are roughly 37 silences of 1 second or more. And there's 3 matches for the phrase that I gave it, which is there's a, and it's asking me for follow-up. I'm going to say, go ahead and do it. And I can see it's working. So there is the ignore on there's a, you can see that exact phrase. Is ignored, AKA stricken out on the transcript in 3 areas. And the cuts are starting to happen on the word gaps. The word gaps are indicated by these dots on the transcript. Those are word gaps, meaning I'm not actively speaking in those parts. Okay. And it's done. So you can see where those word gaps were. Those are also ignored, AKA stricken out, as well as that there's a is ignored. And now if I'm happy with that result, if this is a tool that I want to lock in and use across all future projects, then what I need to do is come back to Underlord, scroll back to the top to my original prompt, this one here, and highlight it and copy it. Right-click on it, copy. And then we're going to open up a new Underlord chat and this time click on start with a prompt. Template, and that opens up this view. And then click on New Template and then click into this prompt box, right-click, paste. And there is that exact prompt. And then we can click continue. It automatically gives this a name. So it's going to be called Silent Gaps Excerpt Cleanup, and it has a little description of it. And that's it. The rest of this you can leave as is and hit publish. And now in future projects, if I want to use that exact same prompt, I scroll through here. I find there it is, Silent Gaps Excerpt Cleanup. I click use template, and now it's running my bespoke AI tool every single time. And by the way, if you want to get onto the next group call, we do them 3 times a week. Click the link in the description below.
