Inserting silence in ALL dead spots

izotope's dialogue isolate is almost magical. i got rid of breathing without even realizing it. it has one slider, to isolate by artificial intelligence.

I'm afraid that this is going to sound a bit harsh, but there's no getting away from it:

There is no shortcut for inserting silence wherever there's a breath, not least because it's a completely unnatural idea. If you do this, you will make the whole thing really hard to listen to.

When people speak, they breathe. People are used to that, because they do it themselves. If you get rid of that, and even worse, replace it with silence, you're going to get the background noise leaping up and down each time anybody breathes. This is going to sound amazingly distracting. If you really feel that you want to reduce the sound between sentences, then use dynamic expansion, and don't overdo it. And even that can produce ambience shifts as well, although they sound more like pumping sounds than leaping.

The real technical skill in making voice recordings is to get all this stuff as good as possible at source - when the read is happening. Anything at all you do after that in terms of the way it sounds is going to be compromising the material.