Solving this for audio has almost absolutely nothing to do with solving it for video (other than that the detection algorithm will be the same).
Editing audio to deal with "silent sections" is nothing like editing the video for the corresponding sections.
in Audacity you can use Truncate Silence, which is pretty similar. Though obviously just for audio tracks, and I find it a missed opportunity that there isn't a live preview with a slider
We have several silence-trimming operations in Ardour. There's no live preview with a slider because generalized to N tracks where N could theoretically be in the hundreds, that is hellaciously expensive. However, since you can undo/redo trivially when working with metadata instead of actual audio, it doesn't seem like much of an impediment.