WhatsApp Pricing Change Threatens Popular Israeli Transcription Bot
Translated & summarized from Behadrei Haredim by baba
The story in 6 lines · by baba
- WhatsApp's new pricing threatens the free Israeli transcription bot Eliezer.
- Costs could jump from near zero to $5,000 monthly.
- Daily users dropped from 20,000 to 2,500.
- Deaf and hard-of-hearing users are particularly affected.
- The bot now uses Telegram for transcriptions.
- Developers criticize Meta's pricing as excessive.
A recent change in Meta's WhatsApp Business API pricing is jeopardizing the operation of "Eliezer," a popular, free Israeli bot that transcribes voice messages. The new pricing structure would have increased the service's operational cost from nearly zero to approximately $5,000 per month. Eliezer, developed as part of the volunteer initiative ivrit.ai, allows users to send voice messages and receive them back as text. At its peak, the service served around 20,000 users daily, processing tens of thousands of messages. Meta's pricing adjustment made direct transcription returns via WhatsApp prohibitively expensive. The non-profit initiative, reliant on donations, has had to stop sending transcriptions back through WhatsApp. According to the developers, daily users have since dropped to just 2,500. The change particularly impacts deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals who used the bot to read voice messages. To continue offering the service for free, users still send recordings to Eliezer via WhatsApp, but they now receive transcriptions through Telegram or the team's developed Communicator service. Yair Lipschitz, a co-founder of the initiative, criticized Meta in an interview with Channel 14, calling the new prices "extremely high" relative to actual distribution costs. The initiative hopes to find a solution to maintain the service's free accessibility, especially for the hearing-impaired community.
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