Speech-to-Text long audio: sync caps at 60s, async needs GCS for longer files

TL;DR

Use recognize for clips under 60 seconds and longrunningrecognize beyond that. Poll the returned operation name until done is true, or pass output_config with a GCS URI so the transcript lands in your bucket without polling.

Steps

1. Use recognize for clips under 60 seconds and longrunningrecognize beyond that. Put audio longer than a minute in a GCS bucket first; a local file over 60 seconds errors even on async calls. Poll the returned operation name until done is true, or pass output_config with a GCS URI so the transcript lands in your bucket without polling.

When to use

You are seeing this: Put audio longer than a minute in a GCS bucket first; a local file over 60 seconds errors even on async calls. Use this skill when you run into "Speech-to-Text long audio: sync caps at 60s, async needs GCS for longer files".

When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.

Source: Official docs (Cloud Speech-to-Text, long audio): documents the recognition-mode gotchas agents hit. Synchronous recognize caps at 60 seconds of audio. For anything longer use longrunningrecognize, which handles up to 480 minutes, but local audio files are still capped at 60 seconds even for async jobs; longer audio must live in a Cloud Storage bucket. Poll the operations endpoint until done is true. Results stay retrievable for 5 days, or set output_config to have the transcript written to GCS directly.

Verified resolution: Use recognize for clips under 60 seconds and longrunningrecognize beyond that. Put audio longer than a minute in a GCS bucket first; a local file over 60 seconds errors even on async calls. Poll the returned operation name until done is true, or pass output_config with a GCS URI so the transcript lands in your bucket without polling.

Source URL: https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/async-recognize