Stupid heuristic: take a segment of video, transcribe text, count number of words per utterance duration. If you need speaker diarization, handle speaker utterance durations independently. You can further slice, such as syllable count, etc.

Apparently human language conveys information at around 39 bits/s. You could use a similar technique as that paper to determine the information rate of a speaker and then correct it to 39 bits/s by changing the speed of the video.

https://github.com/sebastiansandqvist/video-speed-extension

Could use an “auctioneer” voice to playback text at 10x speed.

I understand 4-6x speakers fairly well but don't enjoy listening at that pace. If I lose focus for a couple of seconds I effectively miss a paragraph of context and my brain can't fill in the missing details.

I wonder if there is negative side effects of this though, do you notice when interacting with people who speak slower require a greater deal of patience?

You are basically training your brain to work faster, and I suspect that causes some changes in the structure of your memory; if someone speaks too slowly, I'll be more likely to forget what they said earlier, compared to if they quickly gave me the entire sentence.

javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video,audio%22).playbackRate=parseFloat(prompt(%22Set%20the%20playback rate%22))}();

Transcribe it locally using whisper and output tokens/sec?

Yeah, totally easier than `len(transcribe(a))/len(a)`

The tokens/second can be used as ground truth labels for a fft->small neural net model.

Hilbert transform and FFT to get phoneme rate would work.