diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 0086487..8aeae16 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -133,7 +133,7 @@ If you are making asynchronous requests, you will always receive a quick respons
 client.async_result("https://api.nlpcloud.io/v1/get-async-result/21718218-42e8-4be9-a67f-b7e18e03b436")
 ```
 
-The above command returns a JSON object.
+The above command returns a JSON object when the response is ready. It returns `None` otherwise.
 
 ### Automatic Speech Recognition (Speech to Text) Endpoint
 
diff --git a/nlpcloud/__init__.py b/nlpcloud/__init__.py
index 7a47ba6..2a7d82d 100644
--- a/nlpcloud/__init__.py
+++ b/nlpcloud/__init__.py
@@ -76,7 +76,10 @@ def async_result(self, url):
         except HTTPError as err:
             raise HTTPError(str(err) + ": " + str(r.text))
 
-        return r.json()
+        try:
+            return r.json()
+        except requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError:
+            return None
 
     def chatbot(self, text, context=None, history=None):
         payload = {
diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index 5b44cdb..1c7103b 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 
 setup(
     name='nlpcloud',
-    version='1.1.44',
+    version='1.1.45',
     description='Python client for the NLP Cloud API',
     long_description="NLP Cloud serves high performance pre-trained or custom models for NER, sentiment-analysis, classification, summarization, paraphrasing, grammar and spelling correction, keywords and keyphrases extraction, chatbot, product description and ad generation, intent classification, text generation, image generation, code generation, question answering, automatic speech recognition, machine translation, language detection, semantic search, semantic similarity, speech synthesis, tokenization, POS tagging, embeddings, and dependency parsing. It is ready for production, served through a REST API.\n\nThis is the Python client for the API.\n\nMore details here: https://nlpcloud.io\n\nDocumentation: https://docs.nlpcloud.io\n\nGithub: https://github.com/nlpcloud/nlpcloud-python",
     packages=['nlpcloud'],