SimulScribe, the scrappy voicemail transcription company, didn’t get acquired exactly, but it just signed an exclusive partnership agreement with Ditech Networks that could be worth as much as $17 million. The deal is $7 million in cash up front with a $10 million earnout, and gives Ditech the exclusive rights to resell SimulScribe’s speech-to-text transcription services on a wholesale basis to telephone companies and developers. SimulScribe CEO James Siminoff will become the chief strategy officer of Ditech, and his co-founder Mark Dillon will also work there.
It is a decent outcome for a startup that raised only $5.7 million and is already profitable on sales of about $4 million, according to SimulScribe CEO James Siminoff. But competition is intense, with Spinvox on the one hand, which has raised an insane $200 million, and Nuance on the other, the speech-recognition behemoth which is nearing $1 billion in sales. SimulScribe offers its own voicemail-to-text service called PhoneTag, which has about 20,000 paying subscribers, and reaches about 80,000 more subscribers through wholesale partnershps with Vonage and British Telecom.
The big play is getting those deals with carriers, but with only 7 employees, SimulScribe didn’t have the resources or manpower to go after those deals. Ditech already has equipment sitting in nearly every major carrier’s network. It sells voice processing software that minimizes background noise on calls to the telephone companies. Adding a new service is a software upgrade. Ditech will resell SimulScribe’s service to its existing telephone carrier customers.
The companies will also combine their two technologies for more accurate transcriptions. Background noise is one of the biggest contributors to auto-transcription mistakes Simulscribe still supplements its transcriptions with humans, but the more accurate the auto-generated text is, the easier it is to fix.
If major telephone companies start adopting voicemail transcription services, it could quickly grow from what looks like it might be a $100 million market this year to a $1 billion million market. A lot of this adoption is being driven by a fear of Google, or more specifically Google Voice. Converting voicemails to emails is one of the great features of Google Voice, but its auto-transcription still needs a lot of work. Google Voice is using a homegrown speech recognition system developed for the GOOG-411 free directory information service (which is why it is not so great for conversational speech). But at least Google Voice is waking up carriers to the fact that the only thing voicemail is good for these days is converting it into emails so you don’t have to listen to them.
Hey ,
I just found you out while googling , and this a really nice blog.
Expect me to be a frequent visitor here. Will read all your posts
Thanks ,
Regards ,
Sourish
(Admin)
OneTrickADay
you run a tech blog and today is the first day you found out about techcrunch? umm yeah
How does 1,000 non-english speaking human transcribers in a 3rd world country scale? Can you really do this economically with 10,000? 100,000?
btw, any plans on fixing the elevator pitches page?
That’s great news for my friend Jamie. Congratulations to him and his team!
Interesting…hadn’t realized that voicemail to email is a growing business niche…
Thanks for the informative article…
phonetag is the best voice to email transcription service out there and it is amazing what Jamie did for $5mm when his competitors outspent him 10x at least.
scrappy is right and it describes Jamie very nicely.
that guy defines the word entrepreneur
Thanks Fred, I can safely say that you are our favorite customer!
And anyone reading this should know that even without an investment or any interest in SimulScribe/PhoneTag you helped us tremendously over the past few years.
My team and I thank you for everything you have done for us,
Jamie
Never heard of these services, wouldn’t have thought that they would be at all popular, think I’d just rather listen to my voicemail instead of pay someone to write it down for me.
thnx for such good post
Well I suppose now recession is over for the silicon valley . Funding has started….. well lot of people ideas are there on my website by users from across the world. If intrested then just conect wit them.
is youtube.com down?
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1. the NewSpaceAgency [ http://www.newspaceagency.com/ ] from which I want to start my own hi-tech and new.space company
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2. and The Most Expensive Domain Name In The Universe [ http://www.them...heuniverse.com/ ] that I want to use to raise funds for my future web projects
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Is $17 million a “decent outcome” for a company that raised $5.7M. At what valuation was that the $5.7 was raised? They get $7 million cash and an earn out? The VC’s get paid back, the founders get jobs with ditech.
I’ve heard great things about the service, but if not losing your investment is considered a decent outcome for a VC these days no wonder the VC world is in trouble.
That said, compared to the coming disaster of Spinvox, this is a grand slam.
You lie !
or is it you lai?
I’ve been using PhoneTag for ~3 years, and it’s a great service. Listening to voice mails is agonizing. Skimming them in a couple of seconds is super easy. I signed up for this service and it solved my problem so well that I never even bothered to explore other options like Nuance. Congrats to the folks at SimulScribe for this outcome.
Congrats to Jamie and the team. He’s a very inspirational entrepreneur with a great service.
Thanks Bryce!
good move by ditech and should be a decent market … back to roots for ditech from sbc’s
..
Jamie and Mark are amazing, and this product continues to be miles ahead of anything else I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a lot, in depth).
I’m really looking forward to seeing things further solidify through this deal. Great outcome.
Ken, we will keep you in the loop. This is going to allow us to accelerate our lead and come out with some really incredible features and products.
Congrats to James & team on this deal.
Thanks Matt
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If there are no new articles on TC, then the whole day feels doomed.
Come on Jason, Michael, and Co., enlighten us, give us something to chew on, I mean to read .
Been using Phonetag for the past 4 years and it might be the best $10 that i spend monthly. I’ve tried spinvox and can honestly say that Phonetag’s technology and accuracy blows them out of water.
Great job!
BIG Congrats to James and the team – they have done ana amazing job building that product and running the company, and its a product I loved using. Much continued success.
Jamie, well done. Your service is amazing – I just can’t fathom listening to VM again…ever!!! Looking forward to seeing what you have up your creative sleeve as you move into the Ditech world.
Jamie, congrats! A job well done!
Congrats to Jamie and the Simulscribe team! I’ve used the PhoneTag service for nearly 3 years and can’t even remember the last time I checked voice mail – a truly useful service in a world littered with good ideas and bad implementations
We are looking for a voice transcription service for a web app that we are developing… customer feedback on phone tag is great.
Congrats Jamie/Mark, look like a cool deal.
Congrats Jamie!
Congrats Mark!
Well done Jamie.
I would argue the article is bit biased here. My view – voice is just as powerful when delivered seamlessly to the hadset and it has as much value especialy if its cheaper than the text conversion.
Admitedly If one does not mind voice to text conversion via a human I can also see the value the text version of a voicemail.
cheers
andy
hi,
I’m Kenyan residing in Nairobi. I’ve worked with Simulscribe about a year ago with an outsourcing company called Urban BPO. I used to hear to transcribe voice messages to text and my accuracy was almost perfect and also I was very fast. Can you please assist me in getting a transcriber job with your company while I’m working from my PC at home. I would greatly appreciate it. Your response will be highly appreciated.
Kind Regards,
Shamdu