Deepgram Self-Hosted 261110: unsupported language hints now fail with HTTP 400 (November 10, 2026)

What changed

Deepgram Self-Hosted release 261110 came out on November 10, 2026. Deepgram marks one change as action required: a language_hint sent to a multilingual model that does not support hints, such as Nova-3 Multilingual, now returns HTTP 400 INVALID_QUERY_PARAMETER. Before, the hint was ignored without a word.

Flux speech-to-text on /v2/listen also checks hints now. An unsupported language_hint fails with HTTP 400 when the stream opens, not after the first audio. A Configure message with an unsupported hint returns ConfigureFailure and the stream keeps its old settings.

Other changes in the same release:

• The dg-token header is no longer a supported way to verify callbacks. This release still sends it, but you should move to Basic Auth by putting credentials in the callback URL. For speech-to-text you can also pass a secret in Extra Metadata and reject callbacks where metadata.extra.callback_secret is missing or wrong.
• Models loaded at startup through [preload_models] now use half precision on supported GPUs, which uses less GPU memory.
• The Engine image needs NVIDIA driver 580 or later with the open kernel module.

Prerequisites

• A Deepgram self-hosted deployment you are about to move to release 261110
• Access to the code or config that builds your /v1/listen and /v2/listen requests

Steps

1. Search your code for language_hint. For each request that uses a multilingual model or Flux, check that the model supports hints. Remove the hint where it does not.
2. If your callback handler checks the dg-token header, switch it to Basic Auth credentials in the callback URL, or to a secret in metadata.extra.callback_secret.
3. Check the GPU host runs NVIDIA driver 580 or later with the open kernel module.
4. Move the images to the release-261110 tags: self-hosted-api, self-hosted-engine, self-hosted-license-proxy and self-hosted-billing.

Test it

Send one request to a multilingual model with a language_hint it does not support. You should get HTTP 400 INVALID_QUERY_PARAMETER. Remove the hint and send it again: it should return a transcript. Then trigger one callback and confirm your handler accepts it without .