Transcription Stopped Mid-Session

If a Hedy session you expected to be 45 minutes shows a transcript that ends at minute 12, the recording was interrupted at some point. The cause depends on your platform — phone calls and Siri trigger interruptions on iOS, aggressive battery rules can stop Android sessions, and the Auto-Pause feature can pause any session after a configured period of silence.

Are You Using Cloud STT? Check the 120-Minute Limit

If your speech recognition provider is Deepgram or OpenAI (both are cloud, both require your own API key), Hedy enforces a default 120-minute maximum session duration for cost-control reasons. Sessions that hit this limit will stop transcribing — even though Hedy can otherwise record audio for hours.

This limit applies only to cloud STT — local Whisper and local Parakeet have no time cap.

To check or change:

Open Hedy’s Settings
Go to Speech & AI > Speech Recognition Options
If your provider is Deepgram or OpenAI, look for the max-duration setting and adjust if needed

If your session stopped right around the 2-hour mark and you’re on a cloud provider, this is almost certainly the cause.

Check If Auto-Pause Was the Cause

Hedy has an Auto-Pause feature that pauses sessions automatically after a configurable period of silence (1-15 minutes). If your session ended at a quiet moment (a break, someone presenting slides silently, etc.), Auto-Pause may have triggered.

To check or adjust:

Open Hedy’s Settings
Go to the Sessions tab
Find Auto-pause after inactivity and either turn it off or increase the duration

Auto-Pause shows a warning banner with a countdown before pausing, so if you’re actively watching the screen you can tap “I’m Still Here” to keep recording. If you’re not watching, you may miss the warning — but Hedy also sends a system notification when the session is paused, so you’ll see it in your notification tray.

See Auto-Pause After Inactivity for the full breakdown.

iPhone and iPad

iOS pauses Hedy’s audio capture when it needs the audio system for something else. Common triggers:

Incoming phone calls (cellular or VoIP — WhatsApp, FaceTime, Signal, etc.)
Siri being invoked (intentionally or by accident)
Alarms going off
Other apps that take exclusive audio access (some music apps, certain games)

What happens depends on which recording engine is active:

In most cases, Hedy attempts to recover the audio capture automatically after the interruption clears. No action needed — recording resumes.
With the experimental Parakeet engine (Apple Silicon Macs and supported iPhone/iPad models), Hedy pauses the session on any interruption and waits for you to tap Resume. Parakeet doesn’t auto-recover.
If automatic recovery fails, Hedy shows “Audio Recovery Failed”: “There was an issue recovering audio after an interruption. Please stop and restart your session to continue recording.” The dialog has End Session and Dismiss options.

Audio captured before the interruption is preserved in all cases.

To reduce iOS-driven interruptions during important sessions:

Turn on Do Not Disturb (or a custom Focus mode) to silence calls
Disable “Hey Siri” if you don’t need it during the session
Plug in the device — sessions on charge are more reliable than on battery

For phone-call recording specifically, see Recording Phone Calls on iPhone.

Android

Android is the platform most likely to silently stop sessions because of aggressive battery and background-app rules. Hedy runs as a foreground service with a 6-hour background and media-processing limit baked in by Android itself, plus a wake lock to keep the CPU active. Even with those, Samsung, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo, and Huawei devices use stricter “deep sleep” lists than stock Android and may stop the service early.

The Hedy Background Operation Optimization Guide covers the device-specific settings to change. The most common quick fixes:

Set Hedy’s battery profile to Unrestricted
On Samsung, remove Hedy from Sleeping apps and Deep sleeping apps, and add it to Never sleeping apps
Lock Hedy in the Recent Apps list (drag the card down on most devices, or long-press → Lock)
Keep the device plugged in during long sessions

If a Samsung session keeps stopping at ~10 minutes, that specific cutoff is documented in the background ops guide.

Mac

The most common causes of mid-session cutoffs on Mac:

The Mac going to sleep while running on battery (System Settings > Lock Screen > “Turn display off when on battery power”)
A different app taking exclusive audio access (rare; mostly with pro-audio applications)
Heavy thermal throttling on Intel Macs during long sessions
The user switching audio devices mid-session — Hedy attempts to recover but isn’t always successful

For long Mac sessions, keep the Mac plugged in and check that “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off” is enabled in Battery settings.

Windows

The most common causes of mid-session cutoffs on Windows:

The PC entering sleep or hibernate (Settings > System > Power > Screen and sleep)
USB selective suspend disconnecting a USB microphone (Device Manager > USB hubs > Properties > Power Management > uncheck “Allow the computer to turn off this device”)
Audio device disconnection (Bluetooth dropouts, USB cable issues)
The Hedy installer being intercepted by antivirus in some cases (see Windows troubleshooting articles)

For long Windows sessions, set the power plan to High performance and disable sleep/hibernate during sessions.

When Hedy Attempts Auto-Recovery

After short interruptions (route changes, brief device disconnections), Hedy’s recording engine tries to restart audio capture automatically:

On iPhone and iPad, the default record engine attempts to recover and continue. The Parakeet engine, by contrast, requires you to tap Resume manually after any interruption.
On Mac, the audio plugin watches for active microphone disconnection and attempts to restart capture when the input device drops out. System-audio device changes are logged but don’t trigger an automatic restart.
On Windows, the recorder is reset automatically if it stalls for more than 10 seconds.

If you see frequent automatic interruptions and recoveries, the underlying cause is usually a flaky audio device — see AirPods and Bluetooth Headphones Cutting Out.

Hedy Background Operation Optimization Guide — Android-specific battery settings
Auto-Pause After Inactivity — configure or disable Auto-Pause
Recording Phone Calls on iPhone
AirPods and Bluetooth Headphones Cutting Out

Still having trouble? Contact us with: your device and OS version, how long the session ran before stopping, whether the device was plugged in, and any error message that appeared. The more detail, the faster we can identify the cause.