I am going crazy.  I thought I could do a Google search and find loads of product.  I am coming up completely blank.  I can't believe that there are no products for this, so I must not be using the right keywords.
 
I often need to edit interviews.  Often times there are awkward pauses, and grunts and things that really aren't welcome on the edited copy.  I have always peels these out manually using Audacity or Izotope RX3.  But I figure there must be software out there that will automatically reduce the pauses, which might take an interview from 80 seconds down to 60 without losing any content.  I bet radio stations do this all the time.  But I can't seem to find any titles.
 
Can somebody point me in the right direction?

There is no substitute for doing it long hand.  An editor program like Cool Edit Pro or Adobe Audition makes it easier and way faster than trying to do it in a DAW.  In an editor you can just swipe the unwanted area, hit a key command and it is gone and everything moves down. Simple as that. You can't do that as easy in a DAW as such.
 
 

An interesting idea, really, but quite a big order. Like "normalizing breaks" by a certain ratio. I agree to that such a software does most likely not exist.
If one existed, I wouldn't dare to use it. You'd have to carefully listen through the edited material anyway, and surely do corrections. In the end you'd spend  just the same time as doing it manually.
 
A program like that might work for recordings made in studio environment, but anywhere on the field with background noises and several people talking at the same time..no. I see too many variables...but then again, most people thought Melodyne DNA was impossible :o/

Kalle Rantaaho
An interesting idea, really, but quite a big order. Like "normalizing breaks" by a certain ratio. I agree to that such a software does most likely not exist.

I am 99.99% certain software list this does exist in the broadcast industry.  They have systems that help them manage their 7-second delay seamlessly, and I think this works on the same principles.  I just don't agree that this should be such a daunting task.  Compared to some of the amazing tings we have seen in VSTs, this seems like child's play.  Basically it would be a noise gate (very well proven technology) combined with an algorithm that simply removes the silence left after processing the noise gate.  There would certainly need to be parameters to control how aggressive the editing is -- or maybe allow the user to specify an overall target length for the entire recording.  But I just don't see that as being particularly difficult compared to other things that people have produced in the universe of digital audio.
 
Now, if we were talking about seamlessly removing video at the same time, that would be a much bigger problem because you would have to analyze the video to see where cuts could be made without being visually distracting, and possible blend together the pieces after the cut.  Again, I think that could be done, but that would be a big order.  Doing just the audio seems pretty simple to me.
 
A more sophisticated version might recognize inflections, such as the cadence and pitch at the end of sentences and leave a little extra space at the end of sentences.  It might also remove "ya know" and other nervous utterances.  I don't expect software to do that today.
 
Doing it by hand is really not a great option.  I'm looking at an hour long radio program from 1988 I'm trying to salvage and I think there is really about 20 minutes of good lively content there.  But I would literally have to remove some space in 300 places.

Since it's a single show you're trying to salvage, doing it manually is a labor of love. 
 
Kinda like using melodyne to "automatically" fix a vocal track...... yeah, that is possible, the feature is there in melodyne, but the big question is, am I satisfied with the results?  Generally, the answer to that is no. So I do it manually. It takes longer but I know exactly what I want to have happen in a certain place with a certain note.
 
If this was something you did for business and did it every day, all day, yeah, looking for a better way, a short cut, would be my primary goal.
 
What Jeff said in post #2 would be the direction I would be most inclined to go if this was a project on my plate.

I am 99.99% certain software list this does exist in the broadcast industry.  They have systems that help them manage their 7-second delay seamlessly, and I think this works on the same principles.  I just don't agree that this should be such a daunting task.

 
You are correct.  This functionality is available in some DAWs.  Sadie for certain which is the software of choice for the BBC, that process is not destructive.  Audition (CS6 and CC), which is found in about 90% of us radio broadcast studios, has a destructive "delete silence" command that works quite well also.  I prefer to do it manually. though, which really doesn't take much more time than listening to the material twice.  

rumleymusic
This functionality is available in some DAWs.  Sadie for certain which is the software of choice for the BBC, that process is not destructive.  Audition (CS6 and CC), which is found in about 90% of us radio broadcast studios, has a destructive "delete silence" command that works quite well also. 

Here is a product that seems to do exactly what I want to do:
 
http://aescripts.com/awkward-pause/
 
But unfortunately it is a script for Adobe Premiere, which I don't have and probably wouldn't buy just for this feature.  But it is nice to know I am not crazy.  Somebody is doing this.  I do this type of interview editing 4 or 5 times a year.  And if I had a tool like this, I would probably use it 15 times a year.

It is unlikely you will find a VST program that can do this for audio.  This kind of editing needs to be done at the program level and VSTs simply cannot do that. Video plugins and scripts are a little more sophisticated in that they can act as external batch processors and alter edits in the timeline.  But they have to be written for each program to be functional.  
 
If you only do it 4,5 times a year, manual is probably your best bet.  Unless you have to do 5-6 per day on a time crunch, you will get better results that way.   

rumleymusic
It is unlikely you will find a VST program that can do this for audio.  This kind of editing needs to be done at the program level

I agree.  I am not looking for a VST.  I just mentioned VSTs as a point of comparison about program complexity.  It seems to me what I am asking for is only about 1% as complex as what some of the really amazing VSTs do.

SONAR has a Process > Remove Silence function that is basically a destructive gate that gives you the option to just flatline audio below the gate level or delete it, splitting the remaining audio into separate clips with gaps where the silence was.
 
If you were able to get the gate settings right to have it delete only the significant pauses, you could then increase the tempo of the project to shorten all the pauses by the ratio of the old tempo to the new one (tempo only affects audio clip start times by default). Or you close all the gaps and set them manually using nudge.
 
Nothing is going to fully automate this for you in SONAR, but Remove Silence may help speed the process of doing it manually. Just work with a copy of the clip, and keep applying/undoing with different values until you get the most workable result. Obviously you'll want to err on the side of caution to avoid losing meaningful information.
 
That said. I had to do this a while ago with about an hour of poetry reading and I did it manually, deleting and closing up long pauses by dragging clips, and using volume automation to silence lip smacks and background noise in shorter pauses. It was a chore, but I'm pretty sure no software could have gotten it right without a lot of manual intervention.