大象传媒

The advert is from September 2007 (scroll down and look at the tenders). I'm not sure it indicates *anything* significant about recent trends towards or away from call centres, does it? A lot changes in technology in two years.

This is interesting ... so Vonage is/was using spinvox?



iphone screenshot from a vonage user .... voice to text transcriber in pakistan.

As a Spinvox user for about a year now the more that i think about i believe that you might be able to tell which calls are handled electronically and which are transcribed by hand as some messages come through within about a minute and others can take about five to come through, which might be the difference between machine V human.

If, and there is no reason to question, Christina Domecq's claim of increasing users from 30M to 100M in fairly short order is this not a case of the tech not coping with demand and Spinvox being pro-active to ensure no loss of service.

That said, does it really matter if human transcription is required due to volume of calls or as part of the learning process as long as Data Protection rules etc and being adhered to?

This whole story sounds very like the showman who exhibited a fabulous 'talking robot', only for it to be revealed as being linked to a person in another room.

Having used leading voice recognition software, which is excellent only after careful and lengthy training, this whole service had to be too good to be true. I'm afraid that any service which offers remote processing of data - backups, etc. included - makes one extremely vulnerable to data insecurity.

If the big credit card companies can't keep data secure 100% of the time, how can people seriously trust a start-up such as Spinvox. It's name seems pretty apt to me!

Rory, if you're going on a tour of their headquarters, I recommend taking a couple of techies with you. Someone familiar with call-centre technology and another who's familiar with internet technology and general programming etc. would be extremely helpful. If their "brain" is so secret, you're extremely unlikely to see anything of any use unless you're able to press very hard, and from a technical angle.

Rory, good luck in getting an invite to Spinvox's overseas call centres. Don't forget to pack the suncream and swimming trunks, as it'll presumably be on 大象传媒 expenses :-)

I'm unsure if everyone isn't missing the point. I'm not a Spinvox user but I have looked at it. Can they take a voicemail, convert it and text it to me? If yes then I don't really care how they do it as long as the price stays the same.

Granted, it would be nice to know there is a shiny piece of kit doing all the work and they should have been more open about offshoring but again, I don't really care as long as it does what it says on the box.

I'm surprised if people just don't care if it's cheap third world labour transcribing their voicemails - isn't there an ethical issue or two here?
Most subscribers reckon they're paying for the use of a clever software engine, automatically converting their messages to text.
I don't imagine Spinvox raised its $200 million of venture capital by suggesting it would be third world call centres that was the secret of their success - they were claiming some kind of breakthrough in speech recognition software, although with the proviso that some human input was required for difficult messages.
If even half the posts on other websites (see PaidContent)are true, especially from those claiming to be former employees, Spinvox looks more and more like a software version of the Mechanical Turk.
It's a fascinating story though - and good luck to Rory in getting to the truth. I agree he should go to the company's HQ armed with absolutely the right technical questions to ask - and get a good look at how their voice to text engine is supposed to work.
This is a link to a patent application for the "system":

This is a link to the comments following an interview with the Spinvox CEO:

Where is the story here? UK customers of Spinvox only have their voice mail interpreted by UK based staff. No breach here.
Users being supplied the Spinvox service via a non UK mobile network are covered under their national data protection laws, unless we are trying to apply UK law extra teritorially. So no breach.
It's pretty obvious that to provide a foreign language service for a foreign network may require a foreign call centre. So no story.
As to the technology, voice recognition has always been a bit poor at best, so it may be valid to criticise Spinvox's performance but at least they try to correct mistakes.
There is a DotCom look about the financial performance but at least they made some cash, though it may take a while for their big deals to generate revenue.

Rory, You may want to take a good look at their finances while you are visiting their HQ in Marlow. I know of one supplier that is struggling to get them to pay for what they have been provided.

timbelfall (#9): Where did you get the "UK call centres for UK callers" from? In the previous blog -- link at the top of this page -- we read Claims to the 大象传媒 suggest that the majority of messages have been heard and transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines with no mention of country differentiation. UK call centres aren't mentioned in the SpinVox blog either, even though doing so would nail the Data Protection arguments.

Rory, this is an opportunity not to be missed! While you're there can you do your readership a big favour?

Christina has said the "majority of calls are fully automated" - so we know it's more than 50%. Can you ask her please if this includes hangups, ie. when someone calls and hangs up without saying anything?

I happen to know the answer is yes. They're not going to give you figures on what proportion this is, but it might be worth asking if the "majority" statement still stands for calls that aren't just hangups. Because you'd agree that's the interesting question: how many calls *that require transcription* are fully automated.

To train a speech recognition system are callers identified and along with voice information stored on a system. Is this privacy debate not getting creepy now especially as callers are not opting into this being done with their voice.

James Whately must be busy.

/blogs/technology/2008/03/the_business_of_blogging.html

I worked for a law firm quite a while back.
We had a client interested in a very similar service that pre-dated Spinvox.

We found that virtually all of the calls were handled by human intervention. Basically used off-shore locations to keep costs down. But was promoted as a magical automated service, with a human element purely as a back up for very difficult calls.

My only comment is that if it is mainly automated, they would have been bought very quickly by a much larger company for a very large sum of money.

If it was automated, then it wouldn't cost 35 cents per 30 seconds of audio to be transcribed. See their API for more info.

See for links to all articles and discussions around this breaking story.