earnings call audio transcript api timed out mid upload

Earnings call audio transcription API timed out mid upload

TL;DR

Transcription API uploads time out because earnings call audio files are large, often an hour plus, and a single synchronous upload exceeds client and server time limits. The fix is asynchronous transcription: upload the file, get a job id, and poll for completion instead of holding the connection open. Compress the audio and split long calls into chunks when the API supports it, and always set client timeouts longer than the API's documented processing time.

The error

(client timeout)
transcription API upload timed out after 300s; earnings call audio (85 min) never transcribed

When this helps

• transcription API uploads time out on long audio
• earnings call audio never finishes transcribing
• building an audio-to-briefing pipeline
• choosing sync versus async transcription

When it doesn't

• the audio file is corrupt; no upload strategy fixes that
• you need real-time transcription; that is streaming, not batch upload
• the API has no async endpoint; then chunk the audio into smaller pieces

Works with

Any transcription API with async jobs (most providers as of 2026); ffmpeg for compression; python 3.8+ with requests.

Steps

1. Compress the audio to shrink the upload

ffmpeg -i earnings_call.mp3 -ar 16000 -ac 1 -b:a 32k earnings_call_small.mp3
ls -la earnings_call*.mp3

Expected: A much smaller file. Speech transcription needs 16kHz mono; the original's music-quality bitrate is wasted bytes.

2. Upload asynchronously and capture the job id

curl -s --max-time 600 -X POST "https://api.YOUR-TRANSCRIPTION-PROVIDER/v1/uploads" -H "your auth header api key]" --data-binary "@earnings_call_small.mp3" -o upload.json -w "HTTP %{http_code}\n"
python3 -c "import json; print(json.load(open("upload.json")).get("job_id"))"

Expected: HTTP 200 with a job id. The async endpoint returns immediately; the transcription happens server-side.

3. Poll for completion with backoff instead of holding the connection

import time, requests
s = requests.Session()
s.headers.update({"Authorization": "Bearer [transcription api key]"})
for i in range(20):
    r = s.get("https://api.YOUR-TRANSCRIPTION-PROVIDER/v1/jobs/[job-id]", timeout=30)
    status = r.json().get("status")
    print(i, status)
    if status == "completed":
        break
    time.sleep(30)

Expected: A completed status within the poll window. Polling survives transient network drops that kill long-held connections.

4. Download the transcript and validate completeness

import requests
s = requests.Session()
s.headers.update({"Authorization": "Bearer [transcription api key]"})
r = s.get("https://api.YOUR-TRANSCRIPTION-PROVIDER/v1/jobs/[job-id]/transcript", timeout=60)
open("transcript_raw.txt", "w").write(r.text)
print("transcript chars:", len(r.text))

Expected: A full-length transcript file. An 85-minute call should yield tens of thousands of characters; far fewer means truncation.

Other ways people phrase this

transcription api timeout large audio upload

Large files plus synchronous APIs equal timeouts. Async plus compression is the standard fix.

earnings call transcription upload failed

Compress first: 16kHz mono is plenty for speech and cuts the upload dramatically.

transcript api job polling timeout

Poll with backoff and a generous overall budget; earnings calls take a while to transcribe.

Why it happens

Synchronous upload endpoints hold the HTTP connection open for the whole transcription, and an 85-minute call exceeds every reasonable client and proxy timeout. Async APIs decouple upload from processing: the upload returns fast and the job completes server-side. Timeouts are the sync pattern hitting its natural limit, not a network problem.

Edge cases

• Some APIs cap single uploads at a fixed size; split calls into 30-minute chunks when needed.
• Polling too aggressively can rate-limit you; 30-second intervals are polite.
• Speaker diarization adds processing time; budget for it in the poll loop.
• Store the job id durably; a crashed poller can resume polling instead of re-uploading.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_bXF1NTRxN8Ti8icEHvhepQ