Transcription Failures with Voice Messages on ChatGPT

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.

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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).

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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.

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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!

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Come on, we need a fix. We need this to be easy to do. I’m sure it is easy to do. It’s just something that really bothers me. And even so, sometimes I use another app to transcribe, and then I paste it into ChatGPT, just to be sure.

There are many solutions here in this thread. Come on, ChatGPT team, please wake up to this!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.