Microsoft has announced that developers will be billed for using its billing and recording APIs in Teams.
Billing for the APIs began on September 1st with recordings costing $0.03 per minute and transcriptions priced at $0.024 per minute.
Some coders may resent having to pay for this feature, particularly those who are already subscribed to an enterprise license.
Benefits of Recording and Transcript APIs
In Microsoft’s blog post announcing the price plan for recording and transcript APIs, Ayan Chakraborty, Product Manager at Microsoft, lists some of the benefits for developers building line of business (LOB) apps and multi-tenant Independent Software Vendor (ISV) solutions.
These include call summarisation, speaker insights, smart follow-ups, and training and onboarding.
Using call summarisation, developers can generate notes, action items, questions asked, and capture meeting clips as highlights.
Speaker insights include sentiment and engagement analysis of customers and interviewees.
Smart follow-ups allow you to analyse previous calls to gain insights on possible discussion topics for the next sales call or interview.
Training and onboarding can be improved by sharing snippets and insights from successful calls to reduce the ramp time of new employees.
These insights can make the meetings themselves more productive too by allowing participants to focus more on collaborating and problem-solving than taking notes and tracking action items.
Microsoft also provides a possible use case for the recording and transcript APIs in its online documentation: “You need to obtain transcripts and recordings for capturing meaningful insights from multiple meetings across the Sales vertical.
“It's time-consuming and inefficient to keep track of all meetings, and to retrieve meeting transcripts and recordings manually.
