skip-silence

⚡ Skip Silence

Welcome Skip Silence 6! Sorry for making you wait that long, but finally here is

Watch lectures, podcasts and videos faster — by skipping the parts where nothing is said.

Skip Silence watches the audio of whatever you’re playing and speeds up playback whenever it detects silence. The moment someone speaks again, it snaps back to normal speed.

A 60-minute lecture with typical pauses plays in ~45 minutes. The extension counts what it saves you.

Features

• Works everywhere HTML5 media plays — YouTube, Twitch VODs, podcast players, university lecture portals, plain <video>/<audio> pages.
• Two speeds, your choice — set a speed for speech (e.g. 1×) and one for silence (e.g. 3×). Skip Silence switches between them automatically.
• Silence stays silent — optionally mute the leftover hiss and keyboard noise while fast-forwarding through quiet parts.
• Smooth transitions — a small audio lookahead lets Skip Silence unmute at exactly the moment speech returns, so soft first syllables and breaths aren’t clipped.
• Zero tuning needed — the silence threshold adapts to each video’s noise floor automatically. Prefer control? Switch to a manual threshold with a live volume meter.
• Per-site settings — different speeds for your lecture portal than for YouTube, or turn it off entirely on music sites.
• Keyboard shortcut — Ctrl+Shift+S toggles it anywhere.
• Private by design — everything runs locally in your browser. No accounts, no analytics, no data leaves your machine.

Development

1. Build and load the extension:

   bun i
   bun run build        # Chrome → .output/chrome-mv3
   bun run build:firefox
   

   Load .output/chrome-mv3 via chrome://extensions → “Load unpacked” (or the Firefox equivalent via about:debugging).

2. Play any video or podcast. The popup shows a live volume meter with the detection threshold — lime bars are speech, gray bars are silence being skipped.

3. Adjust the Speech and Silence speeds to taste. That’s it.

Good to know

• DRM content (Netflix, Spotify) can’t be analyzed — browsers don’t let extensions touch protected audio. The popup will tell you.
• Live streams are left alone: skipping ahead of a live edge only causes buffering.
• Some cross-origin media can’t be analyzed safely; Skip Silence leaves it untouched rather than risk breaking its audio, and says so in the popup.

Development

Built with WXT, React 19, Tailwind v4 and the Web Audio API. bun run dev starts a browser with the extension loaded and hot reload.

Curious how real-time silence detection, the lookahead trick and the per-site model work? Read TECH.md.

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