decision 1 of 3: How do you transcribe hearings of three hours or more without blowing up cost and latency?
A hearing can last minutes or run past three hours; transcription has to serve both extremes without the long ones blocking the short ones.
your call
Long hearings monopolize the GPU and form a queue: a short session that could be ready in minutes waits behind a three-hour one. A single profile optimizes for the average case and fails exactly at the extremes.
✓ real decision — you called it
what was done
Splitting transcription by length keeps short hearings fast and dedicates specific capacity to long ones. Each session is routed to the profile it needs, with neither blocking the other.
your call
Without a GPU, diarizing a long hearing becomes impractically slow. The hourly savings are paid for with results that arrive too late to be useful.
Lesson: "perf: route by length, not by average"