chunk_text split only on "\n\n", but ASR transcripts have none (speaker turns are joined by a single "\n"), so whole 2-3h episodes (~250K chars) went to the extractor in one call and 400'd on context overflow. Fall through paragraph -> line -> sentence -> word -> hard char-slice so no chunk exceeds the cap regardless of punctuation; guard max_chars < 1.
Default extraction to recall-first full coverage (chunk_chars 12K, max_chunks 999) and expose both as run-extract --chunk-chars / --max-chunks.
Keysat