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 …
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).
> That'll start to add up if they want recordings/transcriptions of every meeting for regulatory recording keeping purposes.
These are brand new regs, are they?
Otherwise, how are they complying already at a rate of 5.4 cents a minute (assuming you get charged to record in order to transcribe)? That sounds like an absolute bargain for transcriptions![1]
[1] random "first page I found": The average price charged by transcription businesses in the UK for standard two speaker interviews, conversations or discussions is about 90p to £1.50 per minute, although for a traditional transcription business this price will very much depend on the turnaround time. Recordings for 3 or more speakers can be considerably higher as they are much harder to transcribe.
@that one...
This prices will be for human transcriptions and, in theory, should be 100% accurate.
You only have to watch something on Netflix with subtitles on (English / English) to see how terrible auto transcripts can be, and image how bad it gets when you have several people talking and even worse if they end up constantly over talking each other.
Haven't seen that Netflix example (may try later) but the near-as-makes-no-odds real-time transcription at last year's EMFCamp was impressive. I assumed (ok, yes, never do that) that was machine transcription, given the nature of that camp.
But even if you have a few boners in the transcript, at that price it is still good value.
Certain companies in regulated industries like financial or pharmaceutical firms already have regulations requiring preservation of all emails, phone calls, chat logs, and yes audio recordings of telephone conference call meetings (not sure about transcripts for those meetings, they might only require them if you have to hand over records)
Pretty much the only way you can avoid the requirement for preservation is an in-person conversion, and even then you better make sure you aren't instructing someone to violate the law because they could easily be recording you to protect themselves.
The ability to record is no doubt built into their telecom system along with the ability to do conference calls. They installed those systems 20 years ago, before the idea of making everything a subscription service / ongoing revenue stream had infected the entire business world.
Microsoft charging per minute for this is even worse than making the feature itself a subscription service. Kind of like the difference between an automaker charging you a subscription to get heated seats or remote start, versus charging you per minute / per use. One of them will probably see what Microsoft is doing and we'll see pay per minute seat heating or pay per use remote start coming soon...
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.
"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."
I'd like to see the effect on one of their bots if it had to deal with a suggestion Microsoft might offer something for free.
Idea for app: put up a price ticker on the meeting room big screen, which shows the current MS Teams cost so far - and the name of the manager whose budget it is coming from.
Oh, and a variant that shows the total being charged to the company account for *all* the meetings in progress and monthly total. For use by the CFO.
Goal: reduce the length of meetings[1] and increase employee productivity.
[1] oh, sometimes I really crack myself up; as if anything could ever shorten meetings! Ah me. They'll be taking it out of the biscuit fund instead.
Eh, The CloudTM came and took away all the servers. It'll be wonderful ! we were told. No more admin worries ! they said.
They lied. There is just as much administrative headache with cloud servers, but it's worse because IT'S NOT YOUR SERVER ANY MORE.
And now, icing on the cake, you get to pay to obtain the recordings of YOUR MEETINGS.
Ain't The CloudTM just wonderful ?
Worked at a company where my manager was in back to back meetings 8hrs a day, 5 days a week. I suggested the idea of a 'meetings tax':
* 10% of your salary is allocated as a 'meetings allowance'
* any meetings you attend are charged at £100/hr from your allowance
* first 15 mins of a meeting are free, after that it is chargeable
* you can leave a meeting at any time
* all meetings are optional
* if you absolutely require someone at a meeting, you have to pay for them
* at the end of the year, you get to keep anything in your 'meetings allowance' as a bonus
The idea is to incentivize:
* short, focused meetings
* emails not meetings
* only going to meetings if you can contribute or get value
* only call meetings if absolutely necessary
He thought I was joking. I wasn't.
| He thought I was joking. I wasn't.
Managers think they're only doing their job if they're in a meeting or doing one-on-ones (which are two people meetings). The more people attending and the longer it goes the better, full stop. Managers are there to ruin your productivity.
You're telling the union electrician that maybe it would be okay if you let other workers plug their own laptops into the power points, attacking his very existence.
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