Intelligent Speech Interaction:Pricing

Intelligent Speech Interaction uses the following billing rules:

• If you adopt the pay-as-you-go billing method, you are charged on a daily basis based on the standard billing rules of Alibaba Cloud. Your consumption on the current day is billed on the next day. Therefore, you must keep your account balance sufficient to avoid overdue payments that may affect service use.

• The free trial allows you to use only specified Intelligent Speech Interaction services with a limited duration. To improve the processing capability of a speech service, we recommend that you upgrade the service to Commercial Edition or purchase a resource plan for the service based on your business requirements.

  Important

  If Alibaba Cloud finds any user repeatedly uses the free trial with multiple Alibaba Cloud accounts, Alibaba Cloud is entitled to take appropriate measures without notifying the user in advance. The user shall be responsible for the consequences that arise from the violation.

• Free trial

  The following rules on the use of the free trial have been applied since March 1, 2020:

  • The trial is free of charge. The billing policy may be subject to changes. Follow the latest bulletins on Alibaba Cloud international site (alibabacloud.com).

  • You have unlimited usage of the short sentence recognition, real-time speech recognition, and speech synthesis services on each calendar day if the number of concurrent calls does not exceed two. Intelligent Speech Interaction provides you with a three-month free trial for these services.

  • The recording file recognition service can recognize recording files with a maximum total duration of 2 hours on each calendar day. Intelligent Speech Interaction provides you with a three-month free trial for the service.

• Commercial Edition

  The following rules on the use of Commercial Edition have been applied since June 10, 2019:

  • If you require more than two concurrent calls of recording file recognition or need to recognize recording files longer than 2 hours in length on each calendar day, upgrade the corresponding service to Commercial Edition.

  • Services in Commercial Edition are billed based on your service usage per calendar day. No free quota is available. No fee is charged if you do not use the services. The system automatically calculates and bills your whole daily usage at 24:00 (UTC+8) every day. Bills may be generated with a specific delay.

  • We recommend that you do not downgrade services in Commercial Edition to the free trial. After the downgrade, the services become unavailable because the number of available concurrent calls is decreased to 0.

  • Detailed information:

    • For services billed based on duration, the system accumulates the duration of the speech processed by each service call. The duration is measured in seconds and rounded down. For example, if the speech processed by a service call is 22.8 seconds in length, the duration is recorded as 22 seconds.

    • For services billed based on the number of service calls, failed calls are not counted.

    • All usage on each calendar day is billed at the tiered price for the total usage that is calculated at 24:00 on that day. For example, if the short sentence recognition service is called 500 thousand times in a day, the charge for that day is calculated by using the following formula: 500 × USD 1.20 = USD 600.00. In this example, USD 1.20 is the tiered price that corresponds to the usage of 300 to 999 thousand calls.

    • The number of calls to the speech synthesis service is calculated based on the number of UTF-8 encoded characters passed in each service call. Each Chinese character, English letter, or full-width or half-width punctuation mark is counted as one valid character. If 100 or fewer characters are passed in a service call, one call is billed. If 101 to 200 characters are passed in a service call, two calls are billed. If 201 to 300 characters are passed in a service call, three calls are billed. A maximum of 300 characters can be passed in one service call at a time. For example, two calls are billed for a service call with 102 characters, and three calls are billed for a service call with 201 characters.