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May 25, 2006

Spinvox Converts Voicemails to Text

Michael Arrington

25 comments »

Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch writes about Spinvox, a UK based company that converts cell phone voicemails into text SMS or email messages (or both). Now this is something I would use.

This has been around for a while in the UK but is just rolling out in the US (it requires a deal with your cell phone carrier to work). No deals have been announced yet, but apparently in the UK people are using this like mad - and it isn’t cheap. See MobileCrunch for more.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Timmytool

    May 25th, 2006 at 6:59 pm

    From their What Can SpinVox do Page.

    Email Delivery
    Choose to receive your voicemails as emails as well as, or instead of, texts, so you can keep a record of important messages. Wherever in the world you go, SpinVox goes too! How?

    I need this!

  2. dumbfounder

    May 25th, 2006 at 7:26 pm

    Listening to voicemal takes at least 20 seconds but reading a text only takes about 10. If I get 4 voicemail a day on average, I am going to save at least 40 seconds per day! That’s over 4 hours per year! I love technology.

  3. George | MonthlyDollar.com

    May 25th, 2006 at 8:17 pm

    you’ll never have to scribble down another phone number, nice.

  4. laurent

    May 25th, 2006 at 8:38 pm

    I think that public transcription service would work.
    You submit your mp3 and people can log onto the site and transcribe chunks of it.
    Overtime, your entire mp3 is transcribed.

    We could achieve Quality Of Service by:
    - injecting mp3 with known transcriptions and rank transcribers
    - or make sure that a given chunck of mp3 gets transcribed by more than one person

    We could achieve Confidentiality by chuncking the original mp3 and even adding background noise (beach waves).

    People submitting mp3s could also tell where and when it was captured to entice the curiousity of would-be transcribers.

    Imagine: as a transcriber, I could go back in time and transcribe stuff that was (at least according to the tags!) from 1950 in Paris.

    Do people think that this would work?

  5. Aner Ravon

    May 25th, 2006 at 9:12 pm

    This things has been tried so many times before and for some reason did not work. I don’t think it’s an easy play for web companies - it’s ban operator service. In addition, it’s very expensive to scale it. Still, good luck!

  6. laurent

    May 25th, 2006 at 9:39 pm

    Aner, I don’t know if you were responding to my post but:
    - scale: the webapp doesn’t store the mp3s, simply their URLs and tags (location, date)
    - it mashes up with Google Maps to overlay the locations and dates
    - when a transcriber selects an mp3, a flash player runs on the client and plays back only a chunck of the mp3.
    - operators: I wasn’t targeting voice mails

  7. Vlad

    May 25th, 2006 at 11:19 pm

    I wonder how well their speech recognition works. If people are already paying these high fees in the UK, it must be pretty damn solid.

    The downside for me is that half of my voicemails are in Russian - most of the text coming to my email would be garbage, and I would still be paying for it.

  8. Andy

    May 26th, 2006 at 12:49 am

    Here in the UK, the ‘text to voice’ is more popular. You send a text and it gets read out at the other end. Recently, they have been using celebrity* voices to do the reading so the main use of this is:
    Sit watching TV.
    Text “Get me a sandwitch” to home phone.
    Wait for wife to answer phone and get celebrity message.
    Hilarity ensues.
    Divorce follows.

    *Most recent was Tom Baker of ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Little Britain’ ‘fame’. Swear words read out in grand Shakespearean tones are suprisingly satisfying.

  9. John

    May 26th, 2006 at 2:26 am

    There are apparently already services which do this in the US. Mark Rehjon at Blackberryforums has a very good write up about it here.

  10. Joy

    May 27th, 2006 at 6:32 am

    I’ve been using a service called GotVoice that gathers voicemails and turns it into audio (mp3) that can be streamed or downloaded. It works pretty darn well.

    However, it doesn’t convert the voicemail into text. The service that you listed might be interesting to look into further..

  11. HRBlogger.com

    May 27th, 2006 at 9:13 pm

    I find this to be a super cool product. However, I really wanna see if the recognition function is accurate or not. I have voice recognition on my lap top, but it takes forever to train it to an acceptable level.

    I am guessing it would be a even tougher challenge to train a system with millions of users.

  12. Doug Winter

    May 27th, 2006 at 11:14 pm

    Well I’ve just tried this, and it’s very impressive. The transcription was perfect, even when I left a message in my normal voice. This included reading numbers out, which is my #1 gripe with VM.

    Awesome service.

  13. Robert Sprigge

    May 29th, 2006 at 2:11 am

    I’ve been a paying subscriber to SpinVox for a few months and am pleased with the service. Picking up voicemail on a mobile can be a pain at times especially writing down a phone number just to re-dial it but with this service it’s instantly dialable. It great when on a train going in and out of tunnels i.e. you lose signal. And it pays for itself when roaming abroad. The costs to recieve phone calls on a mobile whilst in other countries are appalling* but this way you can get them by email too. As Doug says the transcription is impressive.

    *The European Commission is sucessfully pressuring phone companies to reduce charges for recieving calls when roaming.

  14. marat

    May 29th, 2006 at 8:31 pm

    I wonder if Spinvox provides a human assisted service or fully computerized recognition?

  15. Matt Sidesinger

    June 4th, 2006 at 7:35 am

    Why has it taken so long for a service like this to emerge? The cell phone carriers should have been providing this service as an additional charge on your plan a long time ago. They are just missing out on my money, oh, but the cell phone carriers would add the “voicemail-to-email conversion” tax.

  16. Shredder

    June 27th, 2006 at 6:49 pm

    Is Spinvox human translation? I cannot believe that a computer does that job with “unbeatable accuracy”. Anyone know?

  17. John Wilson

    July 14th, 2006 at 12:39 pm

    “SPIN” vox is apparently a clue to this apps underlying tech credentials - apparently this is absolutely HUMAN translation. Spinvox voicemail message are routed to India for human operators to code and then send out as text messages. As a consequence, they have specific issues in providing the service to non-English speaking markets and in scaling the service up.

    The Spinvox business is also up for sale, and its being touted round London right now. For potential buyers in the telcon space they believe that it would be relatively straight forward to replicate and hence aren’t convinced that its worth much of a premium. Furthermore, taking such a volume sensitive service into the mass market could involve considerable difficulties in maintaining service levels.

    So big applause for making available a convenient service - but only moderate applause for marginally updating phone based transcription services. Not sure that this really qualifies as “Web 2.0″.

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