500 errors tied to prompt parameter on /audio/transcriptions

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1

Hi Groq team :waving_hand: — we’re seeing occasional HTTP 500 (Internal Server Error) responses from the audio transcription endpoint and wanted to report it with details.

Endpoint
POST https://api.groq.com/openai/v1/audio/transcriptions

Behavior

  • Requests sometimes fail with 500

  • The issue seems prompt-related (removing it works)

    • but it also only happens to some audio files (very rarely) so a combination of both?

What we’ve observed

  • If we omit the prompt parameter, the request works consistently

  • When a prompt is included, we sometimes get 500s

  • Initially, removing \n from the prompt appeared to fix it, but the issue has since returned even with simplified prompts

  • The same original audio file works, but when we split it into left/right mono channels, one of the resulting files now fails intermittently

Example request (simplified)

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.groq.com/openai/v1/audio/transcriptions \
  --header 'accept: application/vnd.api+json' \
  --header 'authorization: Bearer <redacted>' \
  --header 'content-type: multipart/form-data' \
  --form file=@2.wav \
  --form model=whisper-large-v3-turbo \
  --form language=en \
  --form 'prompt=Call about Company X. Transcribe exactly what is said; keep code-switching and diacritics.Do not add roles.' \
  --form 'timestamp_granularities[]=word' \
  --form response_format=verbose_json

Request IDs where this occurred

  • req_01kcsb3zg1e9vtnsr4drht0cav

  • req_01kcsb4gvgf3mrmbsfm12ketym

  • req_01kcsb8kt0e539ak06kbwze0zt

  • req_01kcsba1rnen99hncj9pyxgxjr

Could you please check internal logs for these request IDs and let us know if there’s a known issue with prompts, newlines, or certain audio characteristics?

Happy to provide more samples or context if needed — thanks! :folded_hands:

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2

Thank you for the detailed error report, while I’m having trouble reproducing the error, I’ve filed this as an error with engineering. Thanks!

Oh by the way, what language is your audio in?

3

This one is in english, but i had it happen with french too

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