Encoding Files into Integers and Overcoming Roadblocks

So, um... what about machine learning for audio applications? In the course of starting this podcast, we've edited out a lot of "um"'s from our raw audio files. It's gotten now to the point that, when we see the waveform in soundstudio, we can almost identify an "um" by eye. Which makes it an interesting problem for machine learning--is there a way we can train an algorithm to recognize the "um" pattern, too? This has become a little side project for Katie, which is very much still a work in progress. We'll talk about what's been accomplished so far, some design choices Katie made in getting the project off the ground, and (of course) mistakes made and hopefully corrected. We always say that the best way to learn something is by doing it, and this is our chance to try our own machine learning project instead of just telling you about what someone else did!