I think Dave S chimed into a thread when that question was asked a few weeks ago. I think there is some additional steps to get it going again..but i think its still free...i hope!

Hopefully he re-chimes because I can't find it. No luck so far.

Hi

After the trial period has ended for an Azure Account , you need to subscribe to a Pay per Use Account. But hopefully , you got 5,000 transactions free per month for the Bing Speech API - Equivalent to mean 170 transactions per day.

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/ azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-services/speech-api/

I use it and have never paid - You need only when you subscribe the Azure account to give your Credit Card détails.

Jean Luc

Thanks Jean Luc, I did register and enter my credit card info. They still cancelled it. I am trying to fix it with them now.

Yep, That's correct. You need to subscribe to the pay per use program. You need to give them a credit card number but the Bing Speech if a free service and you won't get charged. I monitored it for a month and never recorded any chargeable usage or had a charge to my account. They are very vague about all this and after studying all the info about this on their site I couldn't find anywhere where they really spelled it out other then repeating that the Bing Speech is a free service.

Look at the links in my post where they give the pricing informations

Just in case you don't want to follow the links Jlucben was so kind to provide:

Bing Speech API  Free, Transactions: 5,000 transactions free per month

Bing Speech isn't mentioned in the FAQ specifically, but with some of the other free cognitive services they say they just throttle you and you don't incur overages on the free tier. I would assume that means you get cut off at 5,000.

Well I reactivated my account. Perhaps cancelling them after 90 days is a new thing. I had to register for the 'pay as you go' option for billing but as mentioned above, there is a 5000 call per month free cap which I will never break.

Thanks all.