Voicemail Transcription on selected extensions only?

[jpercival]

Can transcriptions be enabled for certain extensions only? We don't want the price to get out of hand and really only want to enable it on a few key accounts. We'd like to enable this for travelers and management. We don't want a random $400 bill from Google because every person in our company with a DID has dozens of random transcribed robocalls.

I did read through the documentation and didn't see any extension-specific options.

 

[Evolute IT]

Can transcriptions be enabled for certain extensions only? We don't want the price to get out of hand and really only want to enable it on a few key accounts. We'd like to enable this for travelers and management. We don't want a random $400 bill from Google because every person in our company with a DID has dozens of random transcribed robocalls.

I did read through the documentation and didn't see any extension-specific options.

Unfortunately no. It's just ON or OFF. No selection of users.

The only thing you can choose is to transcribe voicemails and recordings or just one or the other.

 

[jpercival]

Unfortunately no. It's just ON or OFF. No selection of users.

The only thing you can choose is to transcribe voicemails and recordings or just one or the other.

That's what I was afraid of. May want to see if this can get added to a future feature list somewhere as this feature is immediately unusable because of that.

Thanks for the reply!

 

[Evolute IT]

That's what I was afraid of. May want to see if this can get added to a future feature list somewhere as this feature is immediately unusable because of that.

Thanks for the reply!

We don't use it for that reason, and the fact that it can't be configured in multiple languages. In Quebec, I have to because a lot of my customers are either French or English speaking.

 

[VoIPTools]

As a rule, I try to offer solutions you can implement yourself before proposing one of our tools, but in this case there really isn't an option short of monitoring for new voicemails and processing the transcriptions yourself.

While you can not selectively choose which extensions are transcribed in 3CX, our "3CX Voicemail Manager" tool does provide the ability to select which extensions are transcribed. We use Google for the back-end voice-to-text engine, so the transcription quality and costs are the same as 3CX, except you do not need to transcribe all the extensions.

For very small implementations, the cost of our tool outweighs the savings on transcriptions, so you would need to identify other benefits of our tools to justify to expense, but for very large implementations we have seen transcription costs in the thousands of dollars per month. In those situations, this feature alone more than pays for our entire suite of tools.

 

[jpercival]

Thanks for the response. Yes, in this case it wouldn't be suitable but it's nice to know those utilities exist.

 

[cobaltit]

You are worried about $400/month bill from Google for transcription but yet the @voiptoys option which would be cheaper isn't suitable? What price point are you looking for?

And as another option there's plenty of services that offer voicemail transcription via email. It's what we use to use before 3CX offered their option. This would give you granular control over as well as multiple languages, etc.

 

[jpercival]

You are worried about $400/month bill from Google for transcription but yet the @voiptoys option which would be cheaper isn't suitable?

That is correct.

$400 would be an outlandish but plausible number if something went completely unchecked in a fully automated system with the number of extensions we have. While we certainly don't want an accidental $400 bill from Google, we also don't want a monthly $160 bill for voicemail transcription. I am aware that there are numerous other features available in that product, but that's not pertinent here. This is a feature that we only want to add to 5 or 10 extensions, not 200. It would be an unneeded luxury in our case so it's not something we're going to commit that much money to.

 

[jpercival]

What price point are you looking for?

Included in 3CX license plus whatever we rack up through Google.

 

[cobaltit]

Well duh . But it seemed like you were looking for something between now and then but I guess not. Hopefully 3CX will make that change sooner rather than later, although at $.006/15 seconds no one has complained about the pricing, especially with the recordings not being transcribed now. I mean if you can rack up $400 in transcription costs a month based then it would think the transcription costs is a pittance compared to other relative costs.

 

[jpercival]

The $400 number may have been a tad hyperbolic, but it would be foolish of me to enable a feature that costs money company-wide when I would only like to deploy it to 5-10% of the company.

Thanks for your help, everyone.

 

[jpercival]

Just did some very jank math and based off of today's UNDELETED voice messages company-wide we'd be around $100/month in transcription fees. Again, that is based on voicemails that were created today that have yet to be deleted, so the number would likely be considerably worse than that.

Would we spend $100-200+ a month for this feature? Probably not. Would we spend $10 a month to enable this for our CEO, travelers, and managers? Probably.

 

[cobaltit]

Gotcha. Honestly it's a feature I can't live without so I'm happy to pay the price but I suppose folks are a bit more price conscious with today's climate. At least you have some basic budgetary numbers so if it does become more of a need you know what it should cost and then should 3CX make the change to per extension it will become more so. On that note it doesn't look like you have the rank necessary to make a feature request so I'll go make one if there isn't one already.