Restarted Sentences
Damian Moore, Last updated: 15 October 2026
In scripted scenarios voice artists will sometimes misread and want to record the sentence again. If a proper note of this isn’t made at the time of recording then the person editing often won’t notice and the mistake won’t get cut out. This is especially true if you do not have enough time or budget to do a full proofing of the file before publishing.
Through our use of machine learning speech recognition we are able to detect phrases that are very similar and highlight them in case you missed them. It can be a real embarrassment saver!
You should see the restarted sections highlighted in the player at the top of the screen. Click the section to start playing from that point.
Reviewing restarts in the transcript
Not every repeated phrase is a mistake — sometimes a speaker repeats themselves on purpose for emphasis. So before cutting anything, we recommend listening to each restart in context.
The report’s transcript makes this quick. Each restart is tagged on the transcript phrase it overlaps, alongside other findings such as swear words and unwanted noises. Click the tag to open and highlight that finding in the Restarted sentences check, or click the phrase itself to play from that point. A few other transcript features help when you’re checking a restart:
- Follow along — while the episode plays, the current phrase is highlighted and the transcript scrolls to keep it in view.
- Search — find a word or phrase and step through every match, handy for spotting the same line read twice.
- Speaker labels and names — when more than one voice is detected, each speaker is labelled, and you can give them names. That makes it easy to tell a host repeating a guest’s point from a genuine retake. See podcast transcripts with speaker names for more.
The transcript also powers our profanities check, so you can review both kinds of finding in the same pass.
Making it a hard requirement
In every built-in standard, Restarted sentences is Informational with a limit of at most 0: restarts are flagged on the report but never fail it. If your show is tightly scripted and a missed retake should block publishing, create a custom standard and set the check to Required. If restarts are a normal part of your conversational format, you can turn it Off instead. See Standards for how to set this up.
