How to Remove Filler Words From Voice Typing

Why filler words happen when you dictate

Writing and speaking use the same words but a different process. When you write, you can pause, delete, and revise a sentence before anyone sees it. When you speak, every hesitation, restart, and half-formed thought comes out in real time and stays on the record.

That's not a personal failing or a sign you need to "talk better." It's how spoken language works for nearly everyone, including people who are confident and articulate in conversation. A word-for-word transcript will always contain more noise than a written draft of the same idea, because a transcript captures the thinking process, not just the conclusion.

Habits that reduce filler words while you talk

None of these eliminate filler words completely, and they shouldn't have to. But they help:

• Plan one sentence at a time, not a paragraph. Most rambling happens when you're trying to hold an entire paragraph in your head while speaking it. Say one complete thought, pause, then start the next.
• Replace "um" with silence. A half-second pause feels awkward the first few times but is far easier to edit around, or to have software strip automatically, than a vocalized filler.
• Say what you mean out loud when you self-correct, rather than talking around the mistake. "No, actually say Thursday" is easier for both you and any cleanup software to resolve than trying to weave a correction into the same sentence.
• Give yourself a sentence or two to warm up. The first few seconds of any dictation session tend to be the least fluent. Don't worry about it, and don't rerecord to fix it, since cleanup handles this better than a nervous retry does.

Where technique alone stops working

Even with all of the above, real speech still has fillers, restarts, and self-corrections. That's the point where most people either give up on dictation or start manually editing every transcript, which erases the time savings that made dictation worth trying in the first place.

This is really a software problem, not a discipline problem. There are two ways dictation tools handle it: transcribe exactly what was said, fillers included, and leave the cleanup to you; or run a cleanup pass that removes filler words and resolves self-corrections automatically, so what you get is the sentence you meant, not the sentence you spoke on the way there.

How Smpliflow handles this specifically

Smpliflow transcribes with Deepgram Nova, then runs a Llama-3-70b cleanup pass that resolves filler words and self-corrections in real time before the text lands at your cursor. The example from the top of this article:

It's adjustable rather than all-or-nothing, through three refinement levels: Verbatim keeps every word exactly as spoken (useful for voice journaling or brainstorming where you want the raw flow), Standard strips filler words and repetitions without changing your voice, and Executive rewrites the result into polished business prose. Most day-to-day dictation runs on Standard.

None of this requires re-recording, editing after the fact, or thinking about phrasing before you speak. You still talk the way you naturally think. The cleanup happens on the way to your cursor.