diff --git a/milli/src/vector/error.rs b/milli/src/vector/error.rs
index 1e0bcc7fb..d3369ef3d 100644
--- a/milli/src/vector/error.rs
+++ b/milli/src/vector/error.rs
@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ pub enum EmbedErrorKind {
     RestResponseDeserialization(std::io::Error),
     #[error("component `{0}` not found in path `{1}` in response: `{2}`")]
     RestResponseMissingEmbeddings(String, String, String),
-    #[error("expected a response parseable as a vector or an array of vectors: {0}")]
+    #[error("unexpected format of the embedding response: {0}")]
     RestResponseFormat(serde_json::Error),
     #[error("expected a response containing {0} embeddings, got only {1}")]
     RestResponseEmbeddingCount(usize, usize),
@@ -78,6 +78,8 @@ pub enum EmbedErrorKind {
     RestNotAnObject(serde_json::Value, Vec<String>),
     #[error("while embedding tokenized, was expecting embeddings of dimension `{0}`, got embeddings of dimensions `{1}`")]
     OpenAiUnexpectedDimension(usize, usize),
+    #[error("no embedding was produced")]
+    MissingEmbedding,
 }
 
 impl EmbedError {
@@ -190,6 +192,9 @@ impl EmbedError {
             fault: FaultSource::Runtime,
         }
     }
+    pub(crate) fn missing_embedding() -> EmbedError {
+        Self { kind: EmbedErrorKind::MissingEmbedding, fault: FaultSource::Undecided }
+    }
 }
 
 #[derive(Debug, thiserror::Error)]
diff --git a/milli/src/vector/mod.rs b/milli/src/vector/mod.rs
index 5aa58da5d..58f7ba5e1 100644
--- a/milli/src/vector/mod.rs
+++ b/milli/src/vector/mod.rs
@@ -237,6 +237,17 @@ impl Embedder {
         }
     }
 
+    pub fn embed_one(&self, text: String) -> std::result::Result<Embedding, EmbedError> {
+        let mut embeddings = self.embed(vec![text])?;
+        let embeddings = embeddings.pop().ok_or_else(EmbedError::missing_embedding)?;
+        Ok(if embeddings.iter().nth(1).is_some() {
+            tracing::warn!("Ignoring embeddings past the first one in long search query");
+            embeddings.iter().next().unwrap().to_vec()
+        } else {
+            embeddings.into_inner()
+        })
+    }
+
     /// Embed multiple chunks of texts.
     ///
     /// Each chunk is composed of one or multiple texts.