Beam-2 with a temperature-fallback ladder made the final-model warmup
run all three temperature retries under beam search before the server
bound its port, so /health was refused for ~8 min and STT was down that
whole time on every roll (and hinted at slow per-utterance decodes).
Production now runs the accurate large-v3-turbo model greedily at a
single temperature, keeping the proper-noun priming prompt that fixes
names like Amy/Córdoba - fast startup, fast decodes, accuracy intact.
Beam stays env-tunable (HERMES_STT_FINAL_BEAM_SIZE) for a future pass;
serve-before-warmup is a recommended follow-up so cold start never
blocks readiness.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BvMSXH8VH2tMWXanb8SJdf
b99952f16c