[Bug]: Coaching session stuck waiting for Recall.ai transcription that never returns

[jhodapp]

What happened?

When the Recall.ai bot successfully joins a Google Meet but the transcription generation later fails (no transcription is returned from Recall.ai), the coaching session remains permanently in a "waiting for transcription" state. Navigating out of the coaching session and back in does not clear or reconcile the state. The session stays stuck indefinitely with no recovery path for the user.

Expected behavior

When transcription fails to return from Recall.ai within a reasonable window, the session should:

• Detect the failure or stall.
• Surface an actionable error state to the user (with a retry option, or a path to proceed without a transcript).
• Reconcile state on session re-entry (for example, poll Recall.ai for status if the local state has been "pending" past a threshold).

Actual behavior

• Bot joins the Google Meet successfully.
• Transcription never returns from Recall.ai.
• The session view shows "waiting for transcription" indefinitely.
• Leaving the coaching session and re-entering does not change the state.

Suspected area

meeting-ai/ crate (transcription state machine and Recall.ai client). Likely missing:

• A failure or timeout terminal state for transcriptions that never complete.
• Reconciliation logic on session re-entry to detect and resolve stalled transcriptions.

Version

main (observed locally as of 2026-05-24)

Impact

The coaching session becomes unusable for transcription-dependent features. There is currently no user-facing way to unstick the session without backend intervention.