Reliability & Recovery
How Kalima protects your recording through network drops, stalls, and going offline.
Live transcription depends on a stable connection, but real meetings happen on spotty Wi-Fi, cellular dead zones, and laptops that occasionally crash. Kalima is built so a hiccup never costs you your words: your audio keeps recording locally, missed stretches are re-transcribed and merged back automatically, and the session rides through interruptions instead of forcing you to start over.
What Kalima protects you from
- Network drops: If the connection falls away, recording continues and missed audio is re-transcribed when you reconnect.
- Durable reconnection: Kalima keeps retrying automatically and resumes the same session, no need to stop and restart.
- Offline recording: Record with no connection at all; the full stretch is transcribed once you are back online.
- Crash-safe capture: Your audio is saved continuously, so a browser or tab crash mid-recording does not lose it.
The short version: keep recording. As long as you do not close the page, your audio is safe on your device and any words missed during an interruption are filled back in automatically.
How recovery works
Behind the scenes, Kalima separates two jobs: capturing your audio and transcribing it. Capture happens locally on your device and almost never stops. Transcription happens over the network and is the part that can be interrupted. Because these are independent, a network problem only delays your text, it never erases the underlying audio.
Recording continues locally. While you record, your audio is saved on your device in small pieces. If anything goes wrong with the connection, capture carries on uninterrupted.
A gap is detected. When live results stop arriving, because the connection dropped, transcription stalled, or you went offline, Kalima marks that stretch as a gap and shows a status banner so you know what is happening.
Kalima reconnects automatically. It keeps retrying in the background and reacts the moment your device reports it is back online. The session stays open the whole time.
The missed stretch is re-transcribed. Once you are reconnected (or after you stop), Kalima re-transcribes only the audio that was missed and merges it back into the transcript in the right place, using the same languages, translation, and context as the live session.
Confirmed and recovered text are clearly marked
Live text first appears as a fast preliminary version and then settles into a confirmed version a moment later. Text that was filled in after an interruption is shown as a recovered segment so you can tell at a glance which parts arrived live and which were re-transcribed afterward. Recovered text always lands in its correct position on the timeline, not at the end.
Recovered text arrives after the live portion, not instantly. During a gap you may see your transcript pause, then catch up once the connection returns. That is the recovery process working as intended.
Durable reconnection
On an intermittent connection, Kalima does the reconnecting for you. It backs off and retries automatically, and the recent audio captured during a brief drop is buffered and sent the moment you are back, so a flaky connection does not force you to stop and start a fresh session.
You will see a Reconnecting transcription dialog or status banner while it works. There is nothing you need to do. If a drop is longer than the brief buffer can hold, Kalima switches to gap recovery instead and re-transcribes the missed stretch afterward.
If a connection fails for an extended period, Kalima surfaces a Transcription paused prompt with two clear choices:
- Resume recording, pick the session back up and continue.
- Stop session, end cleanly and finalize what you have, including any audio still waiting to be recovered.
A live latency badge in the Studio shows how fast results are arriving (green is fast, yellow is moderate, red is slow) and turns gray or red when the connection is interrupted or stale. Glance at it before an important session to confirm a healthy connection. See Live Transcription for more on the latency indicator.
Offline recording
You do not need any connection at all to capture audio. If you are somewhere with no signal, a plane, a basement, the field, record as normal. Kalima skips live transcription on purpose to avoid stale partial results and shows an Offline, recording locally indicator. When you reconnect or stop, the entire offline stretch is transcribed automatically and added to the session using your original settings.
Keep recording. Kalima reconnects automatically and buffers recent audio during short drops. Anything it cannot stream live is recovered afterward. You will see a reconnecting or restoring status while it catches up.
Recovery and offline transcription both rely on the locally recorded audio still existing for that window. Keep the Studio tab open until your transcript has caught up, and avoid clearing your browser data mid-recording.
Crash-safe local capture
Your recorded audio is saved continuously in small pieces (roughly every few seconds) so an unexpected browser or tab crash mid-recording does not lose what you captured. When you stop, the audio is finalized into a compact, smooth-to-scrub file for playback, and the raw audio is available instantly so you can start listening right away while the seekable version finishes preparing.
This local audio lives on your device for playback and recovery. It is not uploaded to the cloud, so it does not count toward your plan's cloud storage.
Very long or large recordings may be kept in their original format if they are too big to re-process for smooth seeking, playback and the transcript still work, but precise scrubbing can be limited. For tight seeking, keep individual takes shorter.
Multi-take sessions stay together
You can stop and start recording several times within a single session, for a meeting with breaks, a multi-part interview, or simply stepping away. Each take is added to the same transcript and the session clock continues from where it left off, so recovery and reconnection behave consistently across the whole session rather than per take.
Automatic stop when your balance runs out
Recording time is metered against your balance, and Kalima stops cleanly rather than letting a session run away with your minutes.
Low-balance warning. When you have roughly two minutes of recording time left, a warning shows your remaining time so you can add credits if you want to keep going.
Grace countdown. If the balance reaches zero, a short grace countdown appears before recording ends, giving you a final chance to react.
Clean automatic stop. Recording stops on its own and your transcript is finalized. Nothing recorded up to that point is lost.
When you record under an organization or team, shared balances are drawn from automatically where available, so an empty personal balance does not necessarily end the session. See Minutes, Credits & Balance for how funding order works.
Best practices for unreliable conditions
A few habits make recovery seamless:
• Keep the recording tab open and the device awake until your transcript has fully caught up after a drop.
• On a known-bad connection, expect a pause then a catch-up, it is recovering, not stuck.
• Top up your balance before long sessions so a low-balance stop never interrupts you.
• On the desktop app, system-audio and screen capture are saved locally too, adding another layer of resilience for meetings.
Limitations to know
- Recovery needs the locally recorded audio for the missed window to still exist on your device.
- Very early audio captured right as a recording begins can occasionally be harder to recover.
- Recovered text always arrives after the live portion, it is never instant.
- Only a limited amount of recent audio is buffered during a drop; longer outages are handled by gap recovery instead of instant resume.
Frequently asked questions
Recording keeps going and your audio is saved locally. Kalima reconnects automatically, and anything missed during the outage is re-transcribed afterward and merged into the transcript in the correct place. You will see a reconnecting or restoring status while it works.
No. Your audio is captured locally the whole time, so the words are never lost, they are simply filled in once the connection returns. Short drops are bridged by buffered audio; longer ones are recovered by re-transcribing the missed stretch.
That stretch was filled in by gap recovery after an interruption rather than transcribed live. Recovered segments are marked so you can tell them apart, and they are placed in their correct position on the timeline. This is expected behavior.
The connection failed for long enough that Kalima wants your input. Choose Resume recording to continue the session, or Stop session to finalize cleanly. Either way, audio captured up to that point is kept and recovered.
Yes. Record as normal, Kalima saves your audio locally and shows an offline indicator. No live text appears while you are offline, but the whole stretch is transcribed automatically when you reconnect or stop, using your session's original settings.
Your audio is saved continuously in small pieces while you record, so a crash mid-recording does not lose what was captured. After restarting, your recording is finalized and playable as usual.
Most likely your balance ran out. You receive a low-balance warning at about two minutes remaining, then a short grace countdown, after which recording stops automatically. Add recording time or credits to start a new take. If a shared team or organization balance is available, it is drawn from automatically.
Yes. Recovered audio is re-transcribed with the same languages, translation, and session context as the live portion, and speaker numbering stays consistent across the whole session.