Cut Silences (Pipeline Agent 1)

First step of the automated edit. Takes a raw recording + its word-level transcript and removes only silence: dead air before the first word and after the last word, plus inter-word pauses longer than a threshold (trimmed down to a natural breath, never a hard zero-gap). It leaves the speaker's words untouched — false starts, retakes, and stutters are the cut-mistakes agent's job (Agent 2).

This agent is deterministic and transcript-driven, so its output (*.silence-transcript.json) feeds cleanly into the next agents and the beat-sync validator.

When to use

• "cut the silences", "trim the pauses", "remove dead air", "tighten the pacing"
• As the first stage of the master edit workflow, right after transcription.

Prerequisites

A word-level transcript JSON. Either the ElevenLabs Scribe shape ({ words: [{ text, start, end, type }], audio_duration_secs }) or a generic { words: [{ text, start, end }] }. Generate one with the workspace transcriber: