Microsoft billing 3 cents a minute to revisit tedious Teams meetings via API
- Reference: 1693845909
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/09/04/microsoft_teams_api_billing/
- Source link:
Getting meeting transcripts and recordings using Graph APIs is currently in [1]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.
[2]
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.
[3]
[4]
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.
[5]Official: Microsoft unbundles Teams in Europe
[6]Russia's Cozy Bear is back and hitting Microsoft Teams to phish top targets
[7]It's official: EU probing bundling of Teams with Microsoft 365
[8]Global Slack messaging outage cuts world off from colleagues
Microsoft said: "These insights help make meetings more productive for your users, so they can spend more time collaborating and solving problems rather than taking notes & tracking action items."
The company [9]published a guide to using the APIs last month in which it [10]stated that the evaluation mode capacity would be 600 minutes per app per tenant for recording and transcript. The price for additional use was set at "$0.0" per minute, although Microsoft warned that "the price for additional use is subject to change in the future."
[11]
Welcome to the future.
Other online meeting services, such as Zoom, have APIs for accessing meeting content, and Microsoft is no stranger to charging for API access to other Teams services.
However, customers already paying for an enterprise license to use Microsoft Teams would be forgiven for feeling a little hard done by in order to use the service. It is easy to imagine a lengthy meeting racking up the minutes and triggering a potentially eye-watering charge. ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/microsoft-teams-recording-and-transcript-apis-billing-in-public-preview/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZPZTgQpfULNKpTJt03511QAAAws&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZPZTgQpfULNKpTJt03511QAAAws&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZPZTgQpfULNKpTJt03511QAAAws&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/31/microsoft_to_unbundle_teams/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/03/microsoft_teams_cozy_bear/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/27/its_official_ec_to_stick/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/27/global_slack_messaging_outage/
[9] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/graph-api/meeting-transcripts/overview-transcripts
[10] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/teams-licenses#payment-models-for-meeting-apis
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZPZTgQpfULNKpTJt03511QAAAws&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
You are thinking in terms of one long running meeting, rather than the reality of hundreds of simultaneous meetings across a big company at any given time. That'll start to add up if they want recordings/transcriptions of every meeting for regulatory recording keeping purposes.
If you assume the average employee is in two hours of meetings per day or 10 hours a week, and there are 10,000 employees, that's going to add up to millions per year with say a half dozen people per meeting.
One of my bosses has begun recording and transcribing every meeting we have. For what reason? I know not.
Maybe he enjoys going back over endless discussions about that laptop that someone setup and delivered to that remote office last Tuesday.
Or was it Wednesday?
No, no, I'm pretty sure it was last Tuesday.
Unless it was Monday?
Anyway, the point is the laptop was delivered.
Wait, now I come to think of it, it might have been a monitor and dock.
That will have cost $8 (I hope).
Where are the privacy and security guarantees with this?
I mean, if Microsoft are recording and transcribing meetings on the platform then they have access to huge amounts of information about the companies using it. I would demand very very robust guarantees before even considering using it. It'll be even worse when they start offering it for free if you allow them to feed the text into their Bingbot AI training. They'll be able to offer AI employeebots who can have all the daft meetings themselves, and make decisions just as dumb as the ones made in an average real meeting.
This doesn't seem a plausible source of truly eye-watering sums; $1.80 per hour is $1400 even if a meeting contrives to be recorded 24/7 for a month.
Maybe there are people using Teams as a back-end for their surveillance cameras, and this should quickly make them stop.