Inventory Your Speech-to-Text Before the Next Shutdown
OpenAI deprecated four transcription models on August 26 with a February 2027 shutdown. You have six months, which is exactly why this gets forgotten.
- Time
- 10 min
- Difficulty
- easy
- Potential value
- high value
Why today
The deprecation notice went out the same day the Assistants API actually shut down. One of those is a fire and the other is a calendar entry, and the calendar entry is the one that becomes a fire in February because nobody wrote it down in August.
What you will do
Produce a written list of every place your systems transcribe audio, with the model each one names, before the six-month runway starts quietly burning.
- 01 Grep your repos for the four deprecated model strings: grep -rn 'whisper-1\|gpt-4o-transcribe\|gpt-4o-mini-transcribe\|gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize' .
- 02 Check the places code search will miss: voice agent platforms, call-recording tools, meeting note-takers, and any vendor that transcribes on your behalf. You may not own the call, but you own the outage.
- 03 For each hit, note the model string, what depends on the transcript downstream, and whether the caller pins a model or accepts a default.
- 04 Put one calendar entry at a date you choose, not February. A deadline you set is a task; a deadline the vendor set is a surprise.
- 05 Anything already pinned to a non-deprecated model can be crossed off now and does not need revisiting.
How you will know it worked
You have a written list naming every transcription call site and its model, and a dated calendar entry to act on it that is well before February 26, 2027.
How this was checked
A person wrote this page by hand. Each claim below was checked against the fetched document behind its sources before it published.
Claims checked
-
OpenAI announced the deprecation of whisper-1, gpt-4o-transcribe, gpt-4o-mini-transcribe, and gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize.
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Those four transcription models are scheduled to shut down on February 26, 2027.
Research run manual-2026-08-31-transcription-deprecation. Verified Aug 31, 2026.