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.
“After the meeting is over, you’d need to examine conversations in all those meetings to obtain useful information.”
According to Microsoft, after retrieving your meeting transcript and recording data, it can be used to create aggregate insights and intelligence analysis, new leads and highlights, and meeting follow-ups and summaries.
Microsoft provides ample documentation to help businesses start using the APIs, which involves listing recordings and transcripts via Microsoft Graph, obtaining an ID, and then calling the APIs to fetch either the transcript or recording content.
To Buy or Not to Buy?
In spite of these benefits, meetings that run for a long time could quickly start building a hefty price tag. Accessing the recording and transcript from a two-hour meeting, for example, would cost $6.48.
As a one-off, you might not think too much about it, but over time it could add up to a substantial cost. Fetching ten hours of meeting and recording transcripts would set you back $32.40.
Presumably, most businesses will need to carefully pick and choose the meeting content they want to download, or else try to keep their meetings a bit more concise.
Teams is no stranger to billing for APIs. Similarly, in 2020, it launched a new licensing model for call recordings in contact centres called “Advanced Communications”, which was priced at $12 per user per month.
More recently, Teams has been accused of anticompetitive behaviour by Slack, which led to the confirmation of an EU investigation. Now, Microsoft has revealed plans to unbundle Teams from Office 365 in Europe.
