Automatic recovery from sudden connection loss

[aslakhol]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We regularly experience sudden connection loss to Speechmatics across many different customers. We have not been able to track down the reason or any steps to reproduce. The "symptoms" we experience is that socketState becomes closed suddenly, without us intentionally closing the connection.

Describe the solution you'd like
Ideally we would like to not lose connection, but it would be useful if the sdk could automatically restore / restart a connection when there is an unexpected connection loss.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Currently we handle this issue by detecting if socketState turns to ´closed´ when we don't expect it to, and simply start a new connection. In theory we lose a few seconds of transcription when this is done, but for our use case this is tolerable.

Additional context
Our users are mental health practitioners who have 45-90 minute conversations while sitting in an office and we see these things across multiple users, locations, browsers and device types.

[mnemitz]

Thanks for filing an issue, and sorry for the delayed response!

I think the solution here really depends on why the connections are being dropped. If it is due to network conditions, or some other low level issue, the best we can do is start a new session as you've done, which as you mentioned does mean losing some transcription data.

On the other hand, it's possible there's another reason they're being dropped, which we could debug on our end. To do that, we would need the sessionId from the realtime session. This is returned in the RecognitionStarted message, and also returned from the useRealtimeTranscription hook if you're using React.

To help us debug, would you be able to provide us with an ID for a session which experiences this issue? Feel free to share it either here or by email at devrel@speechmatics.com.

Let me know if that sounds good to you, or if you have any other thoughts.

[hnerdrum]

Sorry for the late response on our end as well! I'm a colleague of @aslakhol and have now sent an email to devrel@speechmatics.com with a few session IDs where we believe this has happened.

Thanks for the help!