Transcript unusable
transcript_unusable
The audio decoded and was transcribed, but the transcript came back as the same words repeated over most of the recording, even after the engine re-decoded the looping part once. VoiceLabs refuses that result rather than returning text that was never spoken, and saves no capture for it.
Why it happens
A known speech-recognition failure on long stretches of silence, near-silence or heavy background noise (music, hum, a crowd). It is a property of the audio, not of your request body or your credential.
How to fix it
Send the same audio once more, which can come back clean. If it fails again, trim the silent or noisy parts, or send a cleaner recording of the speech.
Safe to retry?
Once, yes: the re-decode samples, so a second attempt can succeed. A loop of retries on the same audio will not help; change the audio instead.
What it looks like on the wire
{
"type": "https://voicelabs.now/errors/transcript_unusable",
"title": "Transcript unusable",
"status": 422,
"detail": "A human-readable explanation of this particular occurrence.",
"instance": "/v1/speech",
"code": "transcript_unusable"
}
Branch on code, never on status or on the prose in detail: two different problems can share a status, and detail is written for humans and may be reworded. Problems a settings page can resolve also carry settings_url, and a scope failure carries required_scope.
Every VoiceLabs API error is an RFC 9457 problem document with a stable code.