I am convinced that we are going to see a big growth in voice apps that use a mobile phone as a microphone. Today, at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, London-based startup SpinVox announced a new feature of its speech-to-text service that lets users call in their Twitters or send in messages to Facebook or Jaiku.
Is making a phone call easier than thumbing an SMS? Depends what kind of phone you have and what kind of person you are. But the Dictaphone is now social. This will appeal at least to all those people who like to record their notes into a mini tape recorder. They can share those thoughts with the world, and computers will transcribe them.
As far as I can see from a quick perusal of SpinVox’s Website, its service is only available in Europe, and it is not free. But it is an obvious solution to the mobile user-interface problem. The best input technology for a mobile phone is speaking into it. Maybe competitors SimulScribe, Jott, or Yap will step up to the plate in the U.S.
Wait, there is already a way to turn a phone into a microphone for any Web application. It is called the MyVox API from VoodoVox. It is ad-supported so it is free. And the best app built on the API can win $25,000.
Hat tip to our man in Spain, Crunchgear’s John Biggs, who alerted me to the SpinVox announcement, and discovered these weird blockhead dolls at its booth at MWS:
Thats pretty neat! One thing you missed mentioning is that “SpinVox” also allows converting speech to text (since it lets users to use phone as a mic)…
bookmarked @ http://livbit.com
Nice… added and lovin’ it.
I love Jott, useful for everyday life as opposed to a social ‘fun’ thing
It’s not just Europe!
We have it in the US too…
And it *is* free
Just want to extend our 30 day trial to Tech Crunch readers. Spinvox’s social product is great, if you would like Voicemail to Text then SimulScribe is the best, get your 30 days here, https://apps.si...up/a/techcrunch.
My voice is my passport?
Old technology finds new application. Neat and Great.
Jott +1 …this isn’t exactly new “technology” considering Jott has offered this for months…
Hello All:
Scott Hamilton, CEO of VoodooVox here.
Our MyVox API is simply a tool that lets any developer give their app/widget a voice using any phone. All we do is process the telephone call as the developer desires, and then pass the audio files—ie, the voice of the caller—to the developer to do with them what they will. We handle the complexities of the telco component, you do the fun mash-ups.
You can find out more on our MyVox initiative at http://www.myvox.com, as well as the developer challenge. We don’t officially launch this until Mar 3, but I guess the story’s out so bang away at it.
This initiative is derivative of our primary mission, which is to make telephony free through ad-supported in-call media. No, we’re not the guys who are going to play an ad for Coke as you’re trying to dial 911, but if, say, you’re using the ad-supported cellular plan of one of our international MVNO partners and calling Puerto Rico from NYC, we’ll let you know during the dial-out that American Airlines has introduced its third flight of the day from JFK to San Juan. And if you want to learn more press 9 now, we’ll transfer you to the airline at the end of your call.
As it becomes easier to develop telco apps, and as the price of transport approaches zero, we believe it’s possible for many of the telephony services we’re currently paying for to be provided for free or at reduced costs via ad support. Our role is to provide the role of the exchange, which we currently do by tying together almost 500 publishers and their 250M calls on monthly basis. We call this the In-Call Network Exchange, and it’s a one-stop source for marketers looking to deliver targeted messages directly to an engaged consumer. You can find out more about it at http://www.voodoovox.com.
BTW, SpinVox, I can monetize all those calls you’re losing money on today. If you’re as good at web development as I’m sure you are, it will take you a couple hours to get your traffic linked to our In-Call Network.
Scott – PM me your email, our voice blaster service makes 1M calls a month. I’d like to offer a free, ad-supported version. Let’s talk.
http://www.group2call.com
alougher @ group2call dot com
Yeah, last I knew Spinvox was free in the states. I used it when I was sporting my Treo and loved it – it worked well and fast. I *think*, though, that it is people doing the translation (people in India) which is why it’s so accurate. If that’s true it may freak out some people, but I really loved the service. It was easy to set up and easy to use. I switched to an iPhone and visual voicemail obviated the need for it.
Here’s my old review if anyone cares:
http://comments...review-spinvox/
I never used it for any of the social aspects, but I guess the key ingredient of all of that is the accuracy and for that I found it to be really good.
Please limit number of ’showing’ crunchbase companies to 3 with a ’see more’ link to reveal the rest, Its killing your real-estate on your site. Also its making your content move (off front page real fast) thus less efficient for Google to index.
.rb
Just a few points of clarification. SpinVox is actually the commercial leader in the voice to text space, which includes the voicemail to text market. That’s why carriers around the world like Rogers, Alltel, Telstra, Vodafone Spain, etc. have chosen to integrate the solution for their customers, spurning every other provider on the market. If you aren’t a customer of any of the SpinVox carrier partners, you can still get the voicemail-to-text solution via a partnership with uReach at http://www.ureach.com/spinvox/ .
SpinVox is the only voice to text provider that offers service in English, French, Spanish and German. The company has raised $100 million to create an unsurpassed Voice Message Conversion System and industrial grade data centers to support quality and security. Please compare the service to anything out there. I think you’ll be impressed by the quality of the conversions and how quickly they are delivered.
Tony,
I am not sure what you are using to back up the claim of “commercial leader” but I hope that it is not based on the $100 million that you have raised or the small number of deals in the carrier space that you have signed. SimulScribe has been able to outperform you on quality and consumer functionality in every major review, New York times, Wall Street Journal, Infoweek, Laptop Magazine to name a few on a fraction of the budget.
Spinvox is a great company and excellent service, run by two great visionaries that I have a lot of respect for, Christina and Daniel. That said, Tony, please do not allow your excitement in a very young market to proclaim your dominance in the industry.
In a few years we will all know who the leader is in this space. For now at SimulScribe we will continue to allow the consumers and the press to determine that.
Jamie
James Siminoff, CEO
SimulScribe
Hello,
I think it is SpinVox that Vodafone (at least Vodafone Spain) is using for its recently-offered service “DictaSMS”. You can dial a special number, followed by the recipient’s mobile number, dictate your message, and the recipient will get an SMS with that text. When calling a Vodafone number (from any operator or land-line), if the phone is unreacheable you hear a message telling that the phone is unavailable, and gives you the option of pressing “1″, and dictating an SMS. The price for the receiver is free, and for the caller, the cost of a normal call (as if the receiver had picked up the phone).
Regards,
Jonas Andradas.
@Jay Neely: “My voice is my passport?”
Actually if you are interested in using your voice as an “authentication token” (biometric authentication), you could check Agnitio’s product(s): http://agnitio.es/
Regards,
Jonas Andradas.
@ 15
Tony and James, can’t we all just get along?
And James, even if you’re right about your stature in the TTS space vis a vis SpinVox, it’s like taking pride in the fact you’re the tallest lollipop kid.
Cool! Very useful…time for typing a twitter post on a traffic jam will end…, just a call? I’ll love it
http://www.enriqueburgos.com
What surprises me is the hype that is currently surrounding voice to text.
As far as I am aware voice to text using software alone is the “holy grail” which none of the large software companies are close to getting to yet.
If either Spinvox or Simulscribe had something that worked without human intervention well then I think an offer far too attractive to refuse would have been made by now someone like Microsoft.
The human intervention aspect, which I believe is provided in Spinvox’s case by a call centre in South Africa is something that personally makes the service unusable for me.
In reality what you are talking about is a cheap answering service that listens to your messages, types them out and sends them by sms.
That is a business model that is not scalable.
What is required is a company like Microsoft who have massive R&D budgets to sink funds into what is a very difficult technical issue to solve. Recognising accents being just one of the problems.
um, I missed this earlier in the week…
I’m a fan of Spinvox – they’ll grow the voice-to-text market for everybody – but I’ve stopped using it as their guys can’t get my mid-atlantic accent, and there’s no feedback loop for me to improve the text I get. Maybe I should try a South African accent, as their teams are based there afaik, and a ‘bok friend gets perfect texts every time.
& I look forward to trying out Simulscribe next time I’m in the USA; voice recognition software *has* to be the way forwards for shorter notes of one or two thoughts.
Only problem I have with Jott is that they now only allow one number to call in. I have two phones, so I have to set up two separate accounts – lame!