Voice-to-text technology is finally getting some respect. As first reported by TechCrunch UK, Goldman Sachs is investing in a $100 million private financing round for SpinVox, a London-based technology startup that transcribes voicemails to text so that they can be more easily digitized, searched, and manipulated. Other investors in the round included GLG Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management. This brings the total invested so far to $200 million, reports Reuters. The 31-year-old CEO, Christina Domecq (a member of the liquor family of the same name) says this latest round values the company at $500 million. There were rumors previously that SpinVox was pursuing an IPO, but with the markets in a tizzy the company found more private money instead.
SpinVox has some interesting Web apps, including Spin-My-Blog and Facebook and Twitter integration, but it is really a mobile play. People actually pay extra for this type of service on mobile phones. SpinVox has partnerships with twelve mobile carriers, mostly in Europe, including O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 3, and Virgin Mobile. They still have limited availability in the U.S. for any of their services. But if people like visual voicemail on the iPhone—which simply lists voicemails like e-mails but still makes you listen to them—imagine if they could translate all of those voicemails to e-mail and simply read them.
When it comes to mobile, voice is still the best way to input information but it is not the best way to extract it. SpinVox lets you have the best of both worlds. This voice thing is gonna be big.
Congrats Spinvox! That is a big round.
For those that want to try out SimulScribe here is a 30 day trial, https://apps.si...up/a/techcrunch.
Jamie
James Siminoff, Founder
SimulScribe
SPINVOX…how do they do that?
I was a team leader at one of the many houses around the world that
employ agents to convert your
messages, from voicemail to text.
I say was, as I have now lost my job as are many of my family and close friends.
Did I perform poorly, no, I was consistently good hence my elevation
to escalation manager
What changed you may ask; a number of months ago my employer was put
under the new and improved and vastly “FAIR”
SpinVox contract. My employer tells me that they will have no choice
but to amend the terms of my employment contract to
match the terms of the contract that they became subject to.
So, with some fear and apprehension I enter the plush meeting room to
discuss the terms of this new and improved , risk and reward
contract and I leave a broken woman, knowing that although there is a
minimum wage in the country where I work from, come the
end of the month, the unachievable parameters, just to be paid let
alone bonused, will be the cause of my demise.
My departure will not be by my own hand it will be by the hand of my
employer, who I actually get along with well, they however
have no choice but to fire agents who do not meet the SpinVox
criteria. I can tell you in the 9 months that I have worked here
245 agents have been through this house processing your messages and
then being fired because you the client deemed our quality
not to be sufficient or you did not get the message swiftly enough. I
believe that at any one time there are up to 4000 out there.
When we had trainers out here training us how the voicemail to text
application (Tenzing) worked they told us of a SpinVox
division in Ireland that sit there day in and day out scoring messages
that we do. How can it be possible that an Irishmen
scores South African based messages, Australian, American Canadian
English and numerous others.
Louisa Crook, Sue Emit and Esther Fortune all SpinVox employees work
in this country illegally They stay here for months at a
time teaching us the ever changing rules of the SpinVox conversion
system. This was further confirmed, by Janice Grant another
SpinVox employee who spends a lot of time with us in Umhlanga.
Every message that you have left arrives on one of our computers to be
converted, these include test messages that you leave and
the most intimate of calls between lovers and sometimes criminals.
Under an oath of secrecy we may not disclose the content of
messages, but how do you think I feel when I hear a man threatening a
daughter with death or a wife with abuse? Any normal person
would be shocked; I have become numb to this now even though it
happens with chilling frequency.
At times we receive warnings that you (Vodacom (SA), Cingular(USA),
Vodafone, Sasktel Canada and Telstra Australia that you will
be testing and are sent scripts with reams of what you may be saying
or the terms you may be using, other times we do not and if
we make one mistake we are severely reprimanded and get chastised
severely, if we convert the message in an ACR (Agent Conversion
Ratio) of 6 or more we get penalised, if we get 3 minor errors or a
major we fail the message.
We receive emails from Malcolm Walden, Simon McBeth, Janice Grant
telling our superiors that we are typing things incorrectly.
When we are told to type what we hear.
Allow me to challenge each and every one of you that may take the time
to read this; record 30 seconds of audio (read from a book
if you have to), take a stop watch and time yourself, play the audio
back and attempt to type it out, verbatim and error free in
180 seconds or less (6 x 30 seconds). You may be successful the first
time, try doing that for 6-8 hours and you will see what I
have had to endure for the last months only to be paid 30% less than
what my pitiful wage actually is, if at all…yes you read
correctly!!
Last month, I worked the whole month processed the worst kind of
messages(see below) from others, achieved a 71% quality score
and an ACR of 9.1 and was therefore not paid. Thank you for this
SpinVox, that is a whole family that will not have an income or
food for the month of December now! I shall have to take a loan to get
myself to interviews now.
I thought you were good, I hear you say, well given that I was a team
leader there is a special level of agent that only receives
escalated messages. These are messages from agents that either do not
want to convert the content as it is offensive or the audio
quality is bad and they do not want to tarnish their scores or it is a
message that has been snatched away from another agent that
has taken to long…… is it fair for me to be penalised when I am
getting all of the more complex, filth laden, poor audio
quality messages?
The next time you receive a voice to text message and want to complain
about bad quality or a slow delivery think about the agent
that has been sitting for 6-8 hours straight, staring at a screen,
listening to audio and converting verbatim what they hear,
to give you the impression that this has been done by a very smart
machine with technology (D2 I believe they call it from what
I read on their website) that has never worked in 50 years of people
trying to get it right.
Keep at the front of your mind that your complaint may be the cause
of the agent on the other end losing their entire salary
as they may breach the tipping point of the complex matrix of
penalties SpinVox have leveraged against the Quality Control
Houses* and then there will be more hungry families that will not eat
and provide for their loved ones and I suspect that
SpinVox would have been paid and are therefore printing money as the
saying goes as they control the data and therefore give a
client what they need to see so that they can enjoy maximum payment
and manipulate our data so that we are paid the least.
On many occasions I have asked my employer to prove the integrity of
the reports we receive and to this day, SpinVox have denied
the request or so my employer has led me to believe. I am sure that
SpinVox does not have these sorts of penalties enforced on
them do they?
Perhaps there is a network operator or client out Alltel, Vodacom,
Cincinnati Bell, Telstra, Sasktel or Vodafone any of you
out there that will be bold enough to tell me what your contract terms
are, so that I know how badly my employer and I have
really been treated and just how severe and deep the exploitation of
me and my people runs at the expense of corporate profits?
Sometimes I think it may be better to go back to the sweat shops and
make clothes or shoes, why have I, at great sacrifice,
taken the efforts to educate myself and try to lift myself out of this
life of poverty. I am not complaining, I do not believe
that in a world where we are all human beings and strive for fairness
and some sort of equality that persons with great pride and
dignity can be treated and exploited for profit in this
way……………I hope you vote with your hearts and minds in your
boardrooms when deciding on whether to take this product on or not and
take some cognisance of the social responsibility that
is demanded of you before agreeing to proceed with greed for profits
ahead of the pain and suffering of others that are at the
other end of the supply chain.
Christina Domecq, Nick Goldson, Daniel Doulton, Nik Mellor, Louisa
Cooke, Janice Grant, Simon Mc Beth, Malcolm Walden, Sue Emit
and all the staff in Marlow that tried to teach us how to be a sweat
shop, I hope that you do not ever have to endure the pain
and suffering my small family and I endured this Christmas with my
heavily reduced salary and ending up jobless. Thank you very
much for my Christmas present I will try and bring my children up one
day to help fellow man and not to try and screw them.
I pray to God you and your family never have the experience that you
are putting so many South Africans and other exploited
citizens of other countries round the world.
I will leave a forwarding address to a gmail account that if there is
any information required by you corporates out there
that are willing to stop this illegal action I will gladly donate my
time and information. I was forced to sign a confidentiality
agreement with these people, but I am happy to say that I did not sign
mine. I am free from any legal binding to SpinVox and
their henchmen. I am going to try and personally contact current and
Ex SpinVox agents in South Africa and get them to petition and then
take this to the highest levels of government.
I want them to stop your organisation from exploiting South Africa. I
will go to the ANC human rights division who want to
ensure atrocities and exploitation like this does not happen.
Signed:
A previously disadvantaged individual but freshly liberated and now
ex-employee of the oppressive regime driven and created by that
fabulous and brainwashed team that call themselves SpinVox and who
believed that they would be able to gag us all from disclosing
their sordid secrets of exploitation and greed and supposed technical wizardry.
(*the euphemistic term used for a collection of agents converting your
messages in a centralised location)
I will be sending a copy of this email to websites around the world
that you have boldly advertised yourself on as being a fantastic
company. I have googled your company and have found the below
mentioned people that I would like to tell how you lie. I have lost
everything and have nothing further to lose I want you to know how it
feels to be treated unfairly so i will share my story with these
people.
Share those secrets, share those secrets!!
i will give it try.
Is it really technology? I thought all the voice-to-text guys do is send voice file to low labor cost mkts for transcription? And then fwd results to user via email?
Not saying that isn’t a valuable service, but is it really technology?
Goldman Sachs is no Venture Capitalist, Sachs isn’t known to throw $100 million of their money at a Web 2.0 company. I don’t think paying for one fifth of this company was a smart move, this company isn’t cutting edge like the iPhone visual voice mail. I could be wrong.
The value you of indexable, searchable voice transcriptions is significant. Once integrated into an application like a mail client (Gmail, Mail, Outlook…etc.), the value is clear.
The time spent transcribing important voice messages, interviews and conversations is cut by these services.
While some services, like SimulScribe and SpinVox do send the audio to markets with cheap labor, the service isn’t always optimal or exact.
I am a current user of both services and it’s of enough value for me to become dependent on once my habits change. I get previews of my voice messages sent to my iPhone in SMS form, so I know who called and most importantly, why, without having to play the message (in a meeting).
GS is investing in the distributed service and in the technology, so SpinVox is widely integrated into applications which increase productivity, and so the quality of the transcription technology involves to an accurate service, whether it be by human or machine (or both).
@3 – SpinVox is all technology — no low labor cost markets.
Congrats SpinVox!!!!!!
Lloyd, I work for SpinVox and have a window on the process. SpinVox employs a series of speech engines and the majority of our English conversions are automated. The Voice Message Conversion System is actually a “live learning” system that “knows what it doesn’t know”. When it encounters new language or ambient noise that confuses the automated process, it then asks a human to review that portion of the message in dispute. That person then converts the portion of the message in dispute and the complete conversion is then delivered. To date we’ve had about 4 million unique voices pass through the system which improves our ability to understand any voice.
excuse my, lack of proof reading
“The value of indexable..”
“…transcription technology evolves to an accurate service…”
I think voice to text and text to voice should become free services in the near or distant future
I have been using CallWave for a while which is free (for now). It converts my voicemail into a text message and texts it to me. It also send a copy to my e-mail. This has become one feature I don’t think I can live without any more. If I miss a call during a meeting, I can read the voicemail and know how to react. It’s not close to perfect yet; however, I usually get the gist.
That’s what I’ve been looking for
There’s nothing I hate more than having to check my voice mail. Since I started using Voice to Text provided by SPinVox, I just check my email. Greatest service EVER!!!!
Great in theory, but I have yet to them transcribe message reliably.
A friend of mine uses SpinVox. He calls me and says things like, “Got your message that you want the elevator out of your pants by noon.” And English is my first language – imagine how it will handle the other 40% of California’s population.
@3 & @4 , i agree with you, overprice is well said for something you can get for now as Free live Callwave like per JasonL said. the big question how they going to monetize this old news technology, will they be able to double their investment in few years?, i doubt. If you look on all the web 2.0/3.0 company they are acquired at a highest price when there is no real proof of ROI or the website can monetize in the coming years..my thought is the reason behind the $200 million value is the latest technology and intelligent individual that Goldman Sach invested in Spinvox. congrats and Goodluck
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
Amazing. TechCrunch UK breaks this story before Reuters confirms it, hearing it from a panel member at the conference I organized in Brussels, Plugg.
http://uk.techc...has-raised-50m/
You still credit Reuters and don’t even link to the exclusive on TCUK …
JESUS!
1) After recovering from my fainting episode of reading this story I recovered to my feet with the question of – WHY would Goldman Sachs invest in this company. Answer the CEO’s family is probably a very large client of Goldman.
2) This valuation is CRAZY! But, I have to tip my hat to the company. According to TechCrunch UK the company generated $865,000 revenue in ‘06. Let’s be aggressive and say that they grew revenue to $5,000,000 in ‘07. That equals a valuation of 100X revenue. HUH!!!!!
FYI – My understanding is that Spinvox is both people and technology. An algorithm translates the voicemail but if – in the minority of cases – it is unintelligible it pops-up in a call Centre in South Africa for a human to transcribe. Some say that model doesn’t scale, but I guess it depends on how good the software can become.
Why not include a link to Callwave that also does something very similar (and for free)?
I’ve been using SpinVox for a year now–I am not an employee or shareholder, just a user. I love this product and consider it a must-have business tool. I used to sit in business meetings and watch my phone vibrate when a call came in, wondering what the caller had on his/her mind. Now, I get an e-mailed transcription of the voicemail sent to my phone within a few minutes that I can read without disturbing the meeting. Sure, sometimes the transcripts get the names of people and places hilariously wrong, but accuracy is generally very high. I can’t imagine doing business without it.
Technology vs. Service
$100M round is great news for SpinVox. But is also an indication about their technology basis or lack of technology. They need the money to fuel their service which is great. However, people should not confuse this with a working technology for speaker independent transcription.
See further on this issue at http://speechan...s.blogspot.com/
Personally, I was disappointed with Spinvox. Orange pushed it on to me and there was no explanation what the service was, how much it cost, who Spinvox were… Then the transcriptions were pretty useless, with lots of blanks, question marks and a wide variety of interesting and creative interpretations of my name “Liam”.
I cancelled; after which I lost all Voicemail services from Orange.
So no, no thank you, not on my voicemail nor my inbox.
Is it really technology
Hi I to have worked for a company in South Africa doing this type of work . I left due to the fact that there was nothing on the day shift for me as I was working nights . This was to long and kept me away from my kids . However I love the work . I have a question to you . Is it possible to do this type of work from your own home?
I patiently await your answer.
Thank you!
Nina
Looking at this dispassionately (I’ve no interest here), SpinVox would not exist if it didn’t do better than its competitors, so they must set high targets. Like any competitive company vying for business against rival companies who offer similar products, employees must not see it as some sort of benevolent society. It (and any cut-throat competitive company) cannot be held responsible for the social benefit assumptions of people who sign-up to be one of its employees. Whilst I have pity for the disgruntled employee, I am a realist and can appreciate the needs of the employer as well as the employee. My advice to those hopefuls would be to be well aware of the high expectations and if you can’t hope to deliver the required results, don’t expect to get the same rewards as those employees who do.
This is the same rule that applies in any successful competitive company. SV is no different. Life is tough but there are easier ways to earn a living than signing up to targets most people couldn’t meet.
NRC