The Speech Patterns I've Trained My AI Agent to Catch

I talk for a living — on calls, in recordings, while thinking out loud with agents. Somewhere along the way I got tired of hearing myself stall.

You can't improve what you don't notice. So I keep a short catalog of speech patterns and ask my AI setup to flag them when they show up. Not to be precious about language. To tighten the signal.

The ones that count

• Um / Uh — pure pause fillers. Harmless in small doses. Loud when they stack.
• "You know" — only when it's a stall tag ("so, you know, I just think…"), not when it means something ("you know me").
• Sentence-initial "So" — the transition crutch. Mid-sentence "that is so cool" is fine. Starting every thought with "So…" is a tell.
• Mid-thought stutters and long trailing pauses — restarting, repeating ("the the way"), or drifting off mid-sentence and climbing back on. That's my brain buffering out loud.
• Trailing "Right?" — the rhetorical check-in glued to the end of a statement. Once you hear it, you can't un-hear it.

Watch list

• Trailing "etcetera" as a list-exit hatch instead of a real "and more like this"
• Paragraph-initial "Okay" — same energy as sentence-initial "So"

Those aren't official yet. They just keep showing up.

Why bother

These patterns aren't unique to me. Most speakers have a version of the same tics. That's why a small shared checklist beats starting from zero every time — whether you're coaching yourself or helping someone else sound clearer.

The point isn't perfection. It's catching the autopilot. When the agent pings a pattern, I don't perform shame — I notice, reset, and keep talking. Over enough reps, the cheap habits get quieter.

Clearer speech is just better UX for whoever's listening. Including future-you listening back to the recording.