Microsoft billing 3 cents a minute to revisit tedious Teams meetings via API

Microsoft has announced billing in public preview for Teams recording and transcription APIs, with pricing starting at 3 cents per minute for recordings.

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 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 published a guide to using the APIs last month in which it 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."

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. ®