AssemblyAI Governed Reference Architecture

Overview

Design explicit trust and lifecycle boundaries for ingestion, jobs, live turns, analysis, and deletion. Keep data, credentials, region, spend, and destructive state visible.

Prerequisites

• The target repository or integration path and the requested operator outcome.
• The AssemblyAI project, environment, region, data classification, and accountable owner.
• Current first-party documentation plus credentials only for a narrowly approved live check.

Current Contract

Pre-recorded jobs are asynchronous resources addressed by transcript ID. Streaming v3 is a stateful billed session requiring termination. LLM Gateway is a separate analysis plane replacing LeMUR. Callback payloads differ by family. Region, principal, credential, retention, and deletion remain visible on every edge.

Authentication

For live work, inject ASSEMBLYAI_API_KEY from an approved secret manager and send the raw value only in the AssemblyAI Authorization header to the configured first-party host. Never print, commit, place in a URL, or expose it to an untrusted client. Callback secrets and temporary streaming tokens are separate credentials.