Spinvox - it's easy when you know how. Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Ordinarily I don't republish comments left on my blog posts, but I though this one was sufficiently interesting to highlight it. The original post was here.
Sadly the comment was left anonymously.
Predictive text within the application HUMAN agents use to transcribe all Spinvox messages makes this possible but I believe your 10 seconds is a little off, perhaps 30 seconds is closer to the mark. How do I know this? I used to transcribe Spinvox messages and I am definitely a human.
The application is called Tenzing and it uses predictive text to assist the operator during transcription. It is very clever and appears intuitive but can get things completely wrong occasionally. Messages are transcribed in various countries including India, Ireland and South Africa where the operation is run by the parents of the VP security and compliance for Spinvox, Sean Groenewald.
The amazing thing is for most of these agents, English is not their first or second language but you will note a lot of common English names are transcribed incorrectly whilst Indian names are usually perfect.
Spinvox continues to be a really useful service for me, and I haven't needed to listen to a voicemail in over 6 months as a result, so I am a fan. My only criticism has ever been that they should simply dump the hype about being a tech company, albeit I recognise that will hit their valuation multiple.
Labels: Spinvox
posted by John Wilson @ 10:32 AM Permanent Link
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3 Comments:
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At 12:48 PM,
said...
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I just did a test and you're spot on about English names..
"Hi Paul, this is a test. Thanks, bye" became "Atholl(?) this is a test. Thank you. Bye." -
At 3:24 PM,
said...
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I saw some info posted about the VCMS system that they have. I suspect they use humans in some form or another to get it right. If they do then this is is a very clever solution to an age old problem and not much different from Google who spend a lot of money employing humans to ensure that search results are refined. so whats all the fuss about i wonder?
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At 4:31 AM,
John Smith said...
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Why blame only Spinvox? Nuance which powers the visual voicemail for Vonage and AT&T has its voicemails 100% manually transcribed from a call center in India. Now if that is not infringement of data privacy then what is? I am posting the link of the call center ID where this transcription is done http://www.focusvmt.com/ Anyway now after Spinvox's buyout by Nuance both are the same. So happy voicemailing! The software which Nuance uses is called Nuance Voice Control. Now we will have to see how the merger between NVC and Tenzing works!!
