[witbrock]

Merge decision: ready — allowing a model now saves and verifies the scoped pool, exposes recoverable failures, and feeds a metadata-filtered recorded-transcription selector.

User outcome

Settings previously staged an additional model indefinitely behind “Pending allowed-model save”. Allow now checks provider discovery and persists immediately, retaining the selected primary and existing alternatives. Failed or unresponsive saves expose a retry or canonical reload action. Task: #V#task_agent_b637ab307fdc076a6db14d2267092cf7.

Material changes

• Inventory all five integrated providers, including all scanned Ollama hosts and the full OpenAI inventory, with availability, target-pool enablement and assigned roles.
• Derive recorded-transcription compatibility from registry capabilities.audio_transcription plus the existing adapter compatibility defaults. Keep effective actor eligibility separate from the administrator's save target.
• Preserve stale browser transcription preferences visibly and recheck metadata, effective pool, provider key and existing execution authority on the server. General chat and realtime/synthesis models do not imply file-transcription compatibility.
• Document the metadata, roles, failure recovery and provider limitations in the existing speech guide.

Evidence

• 50 targeted Jest tests: model-pool controls, model inventory, dictation lifecycle and neighbouring browser model preference preservation.
• 42 targeted pytest checks: audio metadata/inventory, speech transport, settings selectors, OpenAI probes and Ollama cache.
• Changed frontend static lint and git diff --check pass.
• Playwright on the actual Settings template/modules with synthetic HTTP discovery and persistence: failed save → retry → canonical read-back/reload → eligible transcription selection. Primary and existing entries preserved; two save attempts; no browser errors or overflow at 1280×1000 and 390×844. Reproducible via tests/browser/modelEnablement.cjs; evidence /tmp/von-model-browser/evidence.json and screenshots.

Ship boundary

Minimum ship evidence is the tested save/reload/recovery and metadata-filtering path. Lost existing settings, an unusable retry, or selecting a non-transcription model would block delivery; none remains in that path.

Provider catalogue availability is not a quota or inference guarantee. Only the existing OpenAI recorded-file adapter is supported; the selector preference is browser-local. Authenticated live-provider and physical-microphone acceptance were not run: retained host bridges belong to other candidates. No provider generation, credentials, live configuration, database migration or deployment is part of this change. Deployment was not requested.