Lately Chat GPT has been giving me a hard time when I use the speech to text function. If they are short sentences or fragments there is no problem, but if I go on for more than 20 seconds talking, it always crashes.
This has been happening to me for three or four days now and it’s quite uncomfortable because I talk more than I write in the GPT chat. It has happened since there was a small change in the application interface, at which time the tasks option was added.
I agree with this thread. I’m also getting this “Network error - retry transcription” error on longer voice messages. Whenever I get this, pressing the “retry transcription” button never yields any success. This is on stable WiFi with Android 14 on the latest official ChatGPT from Google Play Store. It has been like this for months and it’s pretty random. Must be fixed, otherwise voice input is pretty non-usable.
ChatGPT should give some more verbose error messages or include a “error report” function so we can upload these situations to help with debugging.
Screenshot:
P.S.: I’m a ChatGPT Plus subscriber (not on this account).
Same here. This has been a recurring issue since late last year when the function had been working properly. Now, anytime I go over 3 minutes on any explanation, it feels like I’m fighting against the idea of losing over 10 minutes of thoughts with “Network Error. Retry Transcription.” Mind you, it never actually works if it doesn’t go through the first time. February of 2025.
I understand a full fix of the underlying problem is desirable and that’s why this is taking too long, but a QUICK FIX NEEDS TO BE ISSUED ASAP as this is a critical feature for using ChatGPT over other AI providers and I am considering switching my subscriptions as I can only afford one…
To get useful answers and “real inteligence” out of chatGPT a lot of context delivered quickly is crucial, and hance this feature is much more critical than multimodality and other things that are nice-to-have but not need-to-have.
I am frequently losing the most important conversations because this bug happens more often for longer recordings.
Sometimes, rarely, clicking “try again” actually does produce the transcript, but it’s only for the conversations on the boundary between short and long, so I suspect some server communication, time-out or similar is at play.
That DOES NOT MATTER, you should issue a FIX where you can DOWNLOAD THE MP3, to preserve the conversation IMMEDIATELLY. These are important enough for me that i’d be willing to listen to them and transcribe them myself, if I could!
There are many solutions here in this thread. Come on, ChatGPT team, please wake up to this!
I’m constantly dealing with this and find it’s randomness very frustrating. I’ve realized anything over 5 mins is likely to have an error, but then 2.5 mins randomly has an error. Now I have to break up my text into smaller chunks and waste o1 credits.
Here here. VERY ANNOYING! I’m starting to use other apps because my ability to speak and have it work reliably is incredibly random when it comes to ChatGPT. I’m a 20$ a month user and find it unreliable enough that I can’t use it.
Hi all. I just had the same issue. 5 minutes recording of a very important thing for my work and I lost everything due to network error. I hope this is be fixed soon cause I cannot trust anymore this process.
I am experiencing an issue with the voice note transcription feature. When I record a longer voice note (around two to three minutes), I frequently encounter an error message that says:
“Network Error, Retries Transcription.”
This is extremely frustrating because after speaking for several minutes, the error prevents me from retrieving my transcription, and everything I said is completely lost.
At the very least, the system should save the audio so that users can retry transcription later instead of losing their entire recording.
I would appreciate your support in resolving this issue or providing a workaround to prevent data loss. Please let me know if any updates or fixes are available.
Same issue here. With Advanced voice, I lose the entire conversation with chatgpt - I have even tried to ask it at the end, was the conversation stored and can I close the voice mode now - of course the answer is yes, but ending up with nothing. With basic voice, this only happens with monologues resulting with “Sorry, I’m having issues right now, could not understand what you said”. The latter is a bit better as, at least you only lose only the monologue part instead of entire conversation. Hours of work lost. OpenAI, please fix this.
I call this ChatGPT’s Blue Screen of Death moment.
Got network error after talking for about 5 minutes. And I am feeling anger and annoyance because I feel that this is terrible that there is no way to save the recording in any way and I have refreshed it probably 20 times because I was using the voice to text to help me write a story at a critical part that was meaningful to me and it is now deleted and now I’m trying to have to remember what I wrote and I can’t remember exactly how I phrased the character interactions and now it is not making much sense
so I feel like I have lost a very important part of my story that I won’t be able to get back and I feel that I need to express there should be some way to save the recording so that if there is an error the effort that I’ve put into my creative project is not completely deleted from existence.
I’m a $200 per month user and the transcript simply do not work.
I lost some very important information on my job today.
Is ChatGPT an experiment App that should not be used for work or professional interaction?
If that is the case please be transparent so the users knows it should only be used for entertainment.
Same here. At least OpenAI should open the temp audio storage in the Android or iOs folders, so we could retrieve the temp audio file and upload it later… It´s really annoying! If it´s important I record the audio parallel on dictate or voice recorder. Wtf. Fix it please!
This seriously impacts my ability to use this. If there is a time limit on transcribable voice, then make it explicit so that I don’t waste my time dictating a 10 minute exam answer for fact checking and not be able to even upload the voice file to a different transcription service.
Paying 200 a month and keep losing the damn transcripts!
And it’s always the most important ideas where I expend so much effort!
Either I’m describing something technical or pouring my heart out over a complex issue.
And it’s just gkne.
You haven’t fixed this in over a year!
Are you ***’ kidding me openai?
This is NOT a difficult engineering issue.
This is insanely frustrating—you have an incredibly powerful tool but you’re overlooking the most basic necessity: the ability to save your work.
We get that errors happen, but forcing us to lose our work without any fallback is absurd.
It would be a huge relief (and massive boost) if it could at least retain the original voice recording in the chat, so we can simply hit retry once the issue is fixed.
This continues to be an issue! I’ll talk for 5 minutes and then it just completely loses the transcription with no way to try again. No warning. Simply gone. Very frustrating. Please fix this.
Just lost another long, important voice transcription…sigh.
This should be such an easy, simple fix! What can we do to get this further up the chain to be fixed??
Voice is THE best and fastest way to get the most out of AI. How has this not been fixed yet?
I’ve spoken with a few people from the OpenAI team:
Adam recommended I open a ticket through the OpenAI platform — I did, but they just gave me an inconvenient workaround.
If @logankilpatrick were still around, this would’ve been resolved by now.
Maybe spamming this thread through the support tickets or x…
This is terrible, making my workflow unusable. There’s something like a 30% failure rate on transcription. I can’t use ChatGPT and lose 1/3rd of 5 minute dictation events. This needs to be addressed.
