constructive help or ideas.

unfortunately I have read all of this and many other tutorials outside of Adobe and cannot find anything amiss from my process.  Really frustrating.  As i said some mystery setting in Premiere or my machine is wrong so it 'thinks' it's working but always puts out nothing no matter what kind of video file, what kind of audio quality, identical reference script, etc.  I have a very powerful machine with all legit programs.  Thats why I'm extremely frustrated with it.

ok, thanks for the suggestions, I finally figured it out, and it was my original hunch. 

  It seems to be the MTS files.  Even ones that are now proress transcode and some various other ones that are quicktime outputs from MTS.  It really hates MTS (and so do I).

    The other gripes I found about MTS seem to indicate that the 'analyze' button is greyed out if it's out of it's folder structure, but I never had that problem it just tried anyway and came up empty. 

  Also if anyone was interested in trying this feature - don't.  It's really not useful enough yet.  Even with a near perfect transcription added it's still way off, and even changes some of the pre-transcribed words back into nonsense.  After all that dividing and re-joining clips I still have a trash text transcription thats not clear enough for someone to select from, in a cumbersome fashion that once perfected might save me 10 minutes.

  I thought even after doing my own transcription it would help to have it married to the timecode, but it didn't save anything and muddled what I had already done. 

For fiction through "Story", maybe.  But Pre-transcribed documentary, still a hassle.  One day it'll be great in a few years.