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Microsoft

Microsoft Billing 3 Cents a Minute To Revisit Tedious Teams Meetings via API (theregister.com) 31

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Microsoft has announced billing in public preview for Teams recording and transcription APIs, with pricing starting at 3 cents per minute for recordings. From a report: Getting meeting transcripts and recordings using Graph APIs is currently in public developer preview, so the billing, which started on September 1, might irk coders keen to use these features in their applications. The API for recording is billed at $0.03 per minute, and the API for transcription is $0.024 per minute.

Microsoft cited line-of-business applications or ISV solutions in sales or HR as potential use cases for the technology, which permits recordings as an MP4 video file or transcripts as VTT files to be downloaded. VTT includes handy information such as the spoken words, timings, language, and the names of the speakers. A developer could automatically generate notes and attach meeting clips using one or both content API sets. Other information, such as sentiment and engagement metrics, could also be generated.
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Microsoft Billing 3 Cents a Minute To Revisit Tedious Teams Meetings via API More

Microsoft Billing 3 Cents a Minute To Revisit Tedious Teams Meetings via API

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  • The text that teams transcription produces bears little similarity to the words being said.

    • If it works as well as other AI transcription I have seen, it will have 2 major problems:
      1. It doesn't work well with jargon. For example in a software development meeting, it will take all the jargon words and make a best guess from a regular dictionary entry, and so it will not make sense.
      2. It has a terrible time with accents. It will 'mishear' words an make a best guess from a regular dictionary entry, and so it will not make sense.

      • If it works as well as other AI transcription I have seen, it will have 2 major problems:

        1. It doesn't work well with jargon. For example in a software development meeting, it will take all the jargon words and make a best guess from a regular dictionary entry, and so it will not make sense.

        2. It has a terrible time with accents. It will 'mishear' words an make a best guess from a regular dictionary entry, and so it will not make sense.

        Given that I work (a) a large corporation (b) cryptography, standards and chip design and (c) America, you can rest assured that the jargon and international accents are very much in evidence in meetings.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jhecht ( 143058 )
        I find otter.ai's transcriptions better -- as well as much less time-consuming -- for translating accents than my aging ears. On the other hand, I haven't found any transcription software that's any good with jargon. Even when I kept correcting the transcription of the four-letter jargon for an organization's name, otter picked it up as I corrected over an hour of transcript.

      • 3. Customers are actually still buying and using that shit regardless of how bad it actually is.

        In case we were wondering how shitty ineffective products, manage to stay on the damn shelf...

    • I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13

      Looks like just another random 13-digit number with a dash in it to me.

      Well played sir, well played.

      • I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13

        Looks like just another random 13-digit number with a dash in it to me.

        Well played sir, well played.

        So buy the book and have a copy of that ISBN-13 on your shelf to show off to friends.
        I apologize about the price. I didn't have any control over that.

  • Money Money Money...says it all.

    In today's Big Corp and Big Tech worlds, if you can't monetize it you doing it wrong.

    • The big corp I work for has been working on putting "everything in the cloud" for the past 3 years or so which has been great until things break, then it's not.
      We have had 2 price increases from Microsoft this year, and are going to receive a third one before Christmas. According to our people who work with Microsoft that will happen once they've decided how much it will be.
      Do I care? Why would I? If the cockwombles who run this place like wasting money they should go for it.
      The markets we operate in

    • Money Money Money...says it all.

      In today's Big Corp and Big Tech worlds, if you can't monetize it you doing it wrong.

      Well, in a capitalist society that's the goal of for-profit companies. Making a product that people will be willing to pay for is just one of the many mechanisms that companies can resort to in their pursuit of that goal. There are many others, both within and without the law, and in all cases without any ethical or moral constraints. Such companies are not your friend, and they don't owe you anything.

  • Not a field I know the prices of, but it sounds stupidly expensive to me. Is this another Reddit situation? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

  • Meetings interrupted by ads from your competitors.

    • Well, to be honest, given the quality of the meetings I usually have to suffer, that would be one of the few instances where ads would actually be more interesting than the content.

  • This is expensive laziness. In my experience it is best to designate a (different) person each time you hold a meeting to chair and take minutes.

    Automated transcripts are rarely used.

    One good solution is to hold the meeting on IRC, conversations are automatically transcribed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      You can still transcribe and record meetings for free, and downloads are made available at the end of the meeting. This is just if you want to hook some application into the pipeline using their API.
  • You must pay three cents to retrieve your two cents-worth. That 50% inflation index is more accurate than whatever varyingly gerrymandered lie the government uses to make the CPI fail to represent directly relevant truth.
  • If the meeting is not worth $3/hour for recording and transcribing, then it shouldn't have been a meeting.
    • That describes most meetings I ever attended. You could generally write the summary of everything important by hand on a single sheet of paper.
      • Well look at you, Mr. "low engagement metric" - you're just the kind of work-at-home lightweight they are trying to identify and weed out of the company I'm sure.
        • Never worked at home. I was a lab rat. Most of a typical meeting we spent an hour plus to decide to do what everyone knew we were going to do at the start. The rest of it was spent reviewing results that could have just as easily been sent out ahead of time.

  • Just do a local recording (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    No need to involve MS here, just record locally and put it on internal fileshare servers.

  • So now we can be charged to revisit some tedious meeting?

  • 3 cents a minute sounds oh so reasonable until you recall the number of meetings (organization), their network effect (what did he ask? and how did she reply? in that town hall with 1200 people!), and the habit people have of sometimes playing media muted and forgetting about it.

    It's data ingress/egress charges the cloud gets you with. If it isn't on your on-prem servers and you gotta be conscious how you access it, it isn't really "your data" anymore -- your data has transitioned to some sort of fuzzy own

  • Running a large whisper model yourself will net you way better results than Microsoft's crummy voice recognition.

  • The Council of Energy Vampires has to make a living, too.
  • This capability is already covered in the Office 365 E5 license and it darn well better stay that way! It already works like crap, as does the rest of Teams.

  • This is so you can record meetings only on an ad-hoc basis, of course it's expensive

    If you regularly want to record calls and meetings get a proper Teams call recorder

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