Troubleshooting
No transcript found: what it means and what to do
Why a fetch can come back empty, and which of those cases we can still solve by transcribing the audio.
A video with no caption track is not a dead end. When captions are missing, the audio is transcribed automatically, which is why most TikTok and Instagram URLs still return text.
When it genuinely cannot be served
- The media has no speech. Music-only clips produce nothing to transcribe.
- The link is not a video. A profile page or a search result page has no media attached.
- The source cannot be reached. See the article on private, deleted and region-locked media.
Reading the response
Every failure carries an ai_fallback block saying whether transcription could serve the request instead. available: false with an unavailable_reason means retrying will not help.
Cost
None of these cost a credit. Failed, blocked and empty results are never charged.
Most of these cases resolve themselves, because a video with no captions is transcribed from its audio instead. That fallback is what TranscriptFetch does differently from a caption-only library.
More in Troubleshooting
Still stuck?
Open the chat launcher, bottom right, and include your request_id if you have one. Or email [email protected].