Jeffrey Todd Sooey - Thanks for mentioning this.

I think I can explain the root cause here, as a way of explaining that it fit as a telethon request:

The most common cause of Shorten Word Gaps (executed as an AI action, or via Underlord) cutting off real speech, is that the Word Alignment - the system that tells Descript what audio is attached to what word and where that word begins and ends - is inaccurate.

The usual way to fix this is to re-transcribe the file, but of course you would not know it's a problem until you shortened the gaps, by which point you may have done other work.

Suffice it to say, this is a problem that could require more in-depth solutions that are possible in a 2 day hackathon, but I will keep you posted!