Hey guys, I tried importing a podcast last night using the audio transcription feature. The podcast is quite long, about 55 minutes, and it was a conversation style podcast so I’d imagine it’s quite difficult for Whisper AI to get through it if it even could.
However, the problem I’m having is actually the lack of user feedback. After clicking the import button I got a loading modal for a while which was eventually replaced by a message saying that the AI transcription can take a while. This is helpful but after this there’s no more feedback and the user is kind of just left hanging while the processing goes on in the background.
I logged in this morning hoping to see the popup in the top left hand corner to say it was successful or at least to see the lesson in my library. However, it doesn’t look like it was imported and I’m not sure if it failed or I need to keep waiting.
Would it be possible to add some feedback to track the progress this or just more information to the user. I think not being able to upload and transcribe very long audio is fine but it would just be good to know for certain what is happening.
Have you seen if your podcast is still in the import pending menu? You could have a clue by clicking there, if for some reason something went wrong, and retry to import.
Ah ok, thank you for that suggestion! I didn’t know about that tab. However, it doesn’t seem to appearing for me at all. I’m tried to import the podcast 3 times now and only on this 3rd time did I see a popup in the top right hand corner of the page that said something like “Transcribing X Podcast”.
That disappeared after a few seconds though and then there is no more user feedback
That’s the issue I’m facing though. It doesn’t appear under Imported Lessons and so it’s not clear if it is still importing or the import failed, as there’s no messaging indicating that.
It’s been 3 days since my first import attempt of this podcast so I can probably safely assume that it failed but it would be nice to have more concrete and quicker feedback showing this.
So ironically, now I do. I just got a popup to say the lesson was successfully imported and it’s showing up in my library so it looks like the 3rd attempt at importing was successful. Thanks a million for your help @vernmartin!
However, the issues still remains around the lack of feedback through this process. The first two imports seem to have failed and I only know it was this due to the timing and the fact that I gave the lesson a different name each time I tried to import it. In all 3 attempts, I didn’t see the Import Pending tag appear so it would be handy if there was more feedback around in progress and definitely failures.
Concerning this I had the most weird bug now. I had never seen that “pending lessons” tab either. I also experienced the same problem and was waiting for the transcription of two videos. Then I tried it again and suddenly I could see the tab for the first time, which seems to come and go, irrespective of whether there are pending lessons. Then I can check the notice that both videos failed. I tried again to use the transcription and the most weird thing was that THE TRANSCRIPTION HAPPENED IMMEDIATELY. What happened??? Then I accidentally removed the video and now need to wait again
I just went through the usual steps to import a lesson from an audio file. After clicking on the generate audio I see first that it is “Saving” the lesson and then generating the transcription. I even saw something briefly under pending lessons. So far so good, and that’s what I am used to. Eventually I even get a notice that the lesson was successfully imported. This usually goes without error, but this time, the lesson never shows up. The lesson seems lost somewhere. So I think we need to report a bug to Lingq and have them look into it. Perhaps your lesson is lost like my new lesson is.
Just noticed something. Try to select Last imported COURSES instead of LESSONS. If you have a series that you often download from, it can be successfully saved in the course folder and it won’t be visible with the other lessons.
Inconsistencies with the Whisper AI API, the LingQ backend and the LingQ database
Inconsistent UI feedback on the front end, possibly due to the inconsistencies on the backend and how they trigger that UI, and potential to improve that UI feedback to the user
I just tried to import the same podcast again and the “Pending Lesson” tab displayed for me. However, when I clicked into it, the lesson wasn’t there but the two lessons I had attempted to import yesterday and the day before and hadn’t showed up were there. I had the option to delete them which I did and the Pending Lessons tab stayed on the page with a card saying LingQ couldn’t find any pending lessons. Only after a few page reloads or about a minute did the lesson I had just tried to import show up so it looks like the app knows there’s a Pending Lesson but isn’t displaying it for whatever reason.
