A five-second phone recording took over a minute: stt-proxy waited up to
60 s for the self-hosted gateway, whose GPU endpoint was off and whose NAS CPU
Whisper needs 30-90 s per clip. With a direct provider configured the gateway
now gets 5 s plus the clip length (30 s cap).
The direct OpenAI fallback never produced a result. The production key held
characters that are not valid in an HTTP header, so every request threw while
being built; provider keys are now stripped of BOM/zero-width characters and a
still-invalid key counts as not configured. whisper-1 verbose_json reports the
language by name, which the result contract rejected; names now map to codes.
Fail-closed responses list each provider's failure (status or error class,
no secrets) so an outage can be diagnosed without log access.
