Invoice Audio Transcription: A 4-Stage Readiness Check for Correct Structured Output

Short answer: treat audio transcription as a readiness-gated ingestion step, not as the invoice extractor itself. Check the model catalog first, upload the recording as multipart/form-data to /v1/audio/transcriptions with model=whisper-1, then validate the returned text before asking an extraction model to produce invoice fields. If the ASR model is not available, queue the job or route it to a Whisper-compatible provider; do not turn a transient service condition into a corrupted payable. That