I have a policy against installing extensions but I might make an exception for this one. I default to 2x and often have to go to 3x if the speaker is really slow. The one exception is music production related videos and it is sometimes excruciating to get through. This is most likely because I'm usually watching some kind of instructional or educational video and just want the content and have no interest in being "entertained". That said, I understand that you have to game YouTube's algo and rules in order to make even a tiny bit of money. Imagine if every channel cut the first 30 seconds of every video intro and everyone could just get to the point.

Very interesting idea, but doesn't seem to work very well. I tried on three videos. On two it miscounted to an absurdly low rate of ~1 syllable/s and played it at the max speed which was illegible and in one it failed to detect any speech at all.

This is a very clever idea. Unfortunately I dislike installing extensions, because so many of them seem to get taken over by nefarious owners. Sadly it's poisoned the whole extension platform for me.

FYI: On Youtube, the keyboard shortcut for changing the video speed is simply pressing < or >

Pretty cool, would be great if it could detect accented speech and have a different normalized speed for that. I listen to most people at 2x or more, but I can't usually understand accented English quite that fast.

This is really cool. I build Chrome extensions too and the hardest part with anything audio related is getting the detection right across different types of content. Lectures vs podcasts vs casual vlogs all have very different speech patterns. I wonder if this could also work with non-English content since syllable detection probably breaks down with tonal languages.

Damn it!

Now I am called The Snail Speaker. :(

What I found interesting is ... if you have some recorded lectures from a university, some speakers are ultra-fast at 1x speed; and some others are acceptable once at 1.5 or 1.75.

Most I find difficult to understand at 2.0x though, so I mostly settled between the range of 1.25 to 1.5, sometimes 1.75 (depends on the topic too, of course; some topic is harder to understand, but here my thought was that some are able to speak fast and others can not. It's almost a skill to have or not have).

This would be a killer feature for a podcast app. I can't stomach NPR content unless it's sped up to almost 2x, with the exception of a few fast talking hosts.

How good is the web's support for having subtitles? I'd love a version of this that just worked off of subtitles, rather than audio processing.