Z.ai sells its speech model for meeting minutes and live captions. The API accepts 30 seconds of audio.

Two pages of Z.ai's own documentation, checked on 3 September 2026, describe the same speech-recognition model in ways that cannot both be acted on. The model card for GLM-ASR-2512 lists six uses. The first is real-time meeting minutes — "transcribe online meetings instantly, automatically organizing structured summaries". The third is live video captioning for news broadcasts, courses and video conferences. The sixth is medical record entry: a doctor dictates a patient history, the model writes it down. The API reference for the same model sets the ceiling: supported formats .wav and .mp3, file size 25 MB or less, and audio duration 30 seconds or less. Per call. The limit is not a side effect of the non-streaming path. Z.ai documents a streaming mode for this endpoint, and the same specification applies to it. Streaming here means the transcript comes back progressively while the model works — not that audio can be fed in continuously. There is no long-form endpoint, no asynchronous job for a recording, and no documented way to hand over an hour of audio. What that leaves the caller is arithmetic. A one-hour meeting is 120 separate requests, each cut at a fixed half-minute boundary that lands wherever it lands: mid-word, mid-sentence, mid-name. Every seam is a place where context is lost and where the custom dictionary — one of the model's genuine strengths — has to be resupplied. Speaker continuity across the joins is the caller's problem, not the model's. None of this makes GLM-ASR-2512 a weak model. Z.ai quotes a character error rate of 0.0717, the language coverage is unusually broad for the price — Sichuanese, Cantonese, Min Nan and Wu alongside Mandarin, English and dozens of other languages — and at roughly $0.0024 per minute it undercuts OpenAI's currently recommended transcription model by about half. For short utterances, voice input, commands and single customer-service turns, the shape fits. It is the advertised use cases that do not fit, and the gap is worth naming because of who it catches. A developer reading the model card sees meeting transcription promised in the first line and only meets the 30-second wall after writing the integration. There is an ending that is unusual for a paid product. Z.ai published an open sibling on the same day, GLM-ASR-Nano-2512: 1.5 billion parameters, MIT licence, free to download, and — because it runs on the caller's own hardware — subject to no per-call duration cap at all. For the three long-form uses the vendor advertises, the free model is the one that can actually do them.