Does my Short have audio? Check probe.has_audio before captions

Call POST /v1/video-inspect with frames: false and read probe.has_audio. If it is false, skip transcription: transcribe: true on a silent clip returns inspect_source_has_no_audio. The probe-only call returns no stills, so it is the cheap check. Read from the Sume docs on 2026-10-06.

Why would a Short have no audio?

A Timeline render in audio.mode: "silence" with no soundtrack, a clip exported with the audio dropped by video-trim (audio: "drop"), or a generated clip that ships without a track. Any of these will fail a transcription request.

What does the call look like?

Inspect is a sync-capable route: the default waits up to 30 seconds, and a longer run returns 202 for polling. The source limit is 1800 seconds.

import os, requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.sume.com/v1/video-inspect",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + os.environ["SUME_API_KEY"],
             "Idempotency-Key": "probe-short-001"},
    json={"video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/short.mp4",
          "frames": False},
    timeout=60,
)
print(r.status_code, r.json())

What next if it has audio?

Send the same clip with transcribe: true and segmentation: {"mode": "sentence"}. Speech-to-text is $0.01 per audio minute, and sentence segments come back without gaps.