Usage reporting
For on-prem deployments, usage reporting is required for accurate billing. There are two types of usage reporting we offer: automatic and offline.
Automatic
Learn more about automatic usage reportingOffline
Learn how to set up offline usage reporting using a usage containerHow the reporting mode is configured
Both modes are controlled by the same two settings. SM_EATS_URL sets the destination for usage events. SM_ENABLE_USAGE_REPORTING sets whether the transcriber restricts events to the subset needed for billing (true, the default) or sends the full activity event stream (false).
If SM_EATS_URL is not set, the destination depends on SM_ENABLE_USAGE_REPORTING: at its default of true, the transcriber falls back to usage.speechmatics.com; set to false, there is no destination and reporting is disabled entirely.
Automatic reporting relies on the default destination, with SM_ENABLE_USAGE_REPORTING left at its default of true. Offline reporting sets SM_EATS_URL to your own Usage Container instead, while SM_ENABLE_USAGE_REPORTING remains at its default — the same billing events are sent to your container rather than to Speechmatics.
What data do we record?
We will never send customer audio data over the network. We only record metadata about what our transcriber is doing.
We aim to be completely transparent about the kind of data we record. In future releases, we may improve our service by recording additional technical data in relation to the operation of the transcriber. This will not include sensitive customer data, such as audio files or transcripts.
Data we record:
- Audio duration information to accurately calculate billing
- Customer information including: Contract ID, Customer name and License ID
- Summary of job configuration information, excluding any potentially sensitive information such as Custom Dictionary content
- Audio information such as codec and format type
- System information, including certain error events
We record events about what the transcriber is doing as small JSON objects. Here is an example of the kind of data we send:
{
"container_id": "aee112010359",
"contract_id": "0",
"customer_id": "Speechmatics",
"engine_instance_id": "930ab901-c408-457d-9f6d-dee21ecaac7f",
"event": "TRANSCRIBER_DONE",
"event_specific_data": {
"bit_rate": "512000",
"build_id": "",
"channels": 2,
"codec_name": "pcm_s16le",
"file_metadata": {},
"format_name": "wav",
"inference": "cpu",
"job_config": {
"transcription_config": {
"language": "en"
},
"type": "transcription"
},
"license_id": "b6616911c59c40cbbb32ebf442696a14",
"rtf": 1.975401759147644,
"sample_rate": "16000",
"total_received_bytes": 149562,
"total_received_duration": 2,
"total_speech_duration": 2
},
"session_id": "a29bd398-5745-43ca-9d16-07cdc6eabdd0",
"source": "uniasr-batch",
"time_stamp": "2022-09-14T13:01:13.239Z"
}