Audio Transcription

Audio Transcription

Use When

• The input is audio and the main job is speech-to-text, subtitle-ready timing,

rough speech search, multilingual transcription, or durable transcript artifacts.

• Use video-transcription for video inputs and video-analysis for semantic

video understanding.

Do Not Use When

• The task belongs to ideation, QA, or another released skill listed in the handoff section.
• Required inputs are missing and guessing would change the result.

Execution Boundary

• Hosted transcription runs through the public postplus media transcribe verb

and is async. A submit writes request, response, manifest, generation handle, provider status, provider URLs, and downloaded outputs if already completed.

• The transcription submit command accepts a remote HTTPS audio URL. For a local

audio file, first run the generic hosted upload step, read output.data.download_url from the upload result, then pass that HTTPS URL to --audio.

• A higher-quality default model and a faster, cheaper variant are available;

prefer the default when subtitle quality matters and use the cheaper variant for an explicit rough pass. The generated example below shows the default endpoint key.

Source And Path

• Supply the media duration so the hosted boundary can price and preflight the

request; a missing duration fast-fails before any provider spend.

• Request timestamps when the output will feed subtitles or edit decisions.
• Start with one source file or uploaded audio URL before larger batches.
• Keep internal requests, responses, manifests, normalized transcripts, and

downloaded artifacts under .postplus/audio-transcription; keep final user-facing transcript exports outside .postplus.

Handoff

• If status is pending, return the manifest path, the output.data.id generation

handle, and the poll command postplus media poll --handle <output.data.id>. Do not keep the conversation open just to poll.

• When completed, hand off downloaded artifacts and normalizedTranscriptPath

to subtitle-packager if SRT/ASS is needed.

Stop Conditions

• Stop when required user intent, source evidence, or owned input artifacts are

missing and guessing would change the result.

• If an owned CLI or script command fails, report the exact error and stop. Do

not bypass the failure with metadata-only answers, readiness probing, local payload rewrites, fallback providers, or unpublished tools.

Public Command Boundary

• Choose the smallest matching command or workflow from the user input and run

it directly.

• Readiness diagnostics: postplus doctor --skill audio-transcription.
• If an owned CLI or script command fails, report the exact error and stop. Do

not bypass the failure with metadata-only answers, readiness probing, local payload rewrites, fallback providers, or unpublished tools.

• Use postplus media schema --json only when you need the full endpoint, flag,

and enum contract or are repairing an unknown request shape.

• Run the hosted transcription job with the generated command below; do not call

provider APIs directly.

• For a local file, first run

postplus media-file upload --skill audio-transcription --input-file <audio-file> --mime <audio/mpeg|audio/wav|audio/mp4> --output <upload.json>. Then read the HTTPS output.data.download_url from <upload.json> and pass that URL as --audio. Do not pass local paths, file:// URLs, or storageReference objects to postplus media transcribe.

<!-- BEGIN GENERATED EXECUTION EXAMPLE -->

postplus media transcribe transcription \
  --audio <audio> \
  --duration-seconds <duration-seconds> \
  --output <result.json>

<!-- END GENERATED EXECUTION EXAMPLE -->

• If the CLI returns a quote-confirmation challenge, run postplus quote confirm --json --challenge-file <challenge.json> and retry with the returned token.