SpinVox in a downward spin

Trust a UK technology correspondent to bring down a UK technology company… Rory Cellan-Jones’ seemingly fevered bashing of voice-to-text specialist SpinVox yesterday may have revealed the ‘worst kept secret’ of the mobile industry, but was it entirely fair?

I have watched with fascination SpinVox’s growth over the last few years, and I have to admit I never seriously doubted its technology.  Everyone knows that some messages have to be transcribed by humans, but a majority of them?  After all, it’s clever, but not out of the realms of possibility, that a computer can understand free text from any speaker with 90+% accuracy.  I can say ‘111 farenheit in celsius’ to my Google Android phone and it has no problem at all in giving me the correct answer 43.8888888889 without any voice training or clues whatsoever. What’s the difference?

So what reasons were there for the retrospective naysayers to doubt the technology?  Well for a start I always thought it strange that the heiress of a family of drinks tycoons could come up with the idea for transcribing voicemails in the back of a taxi and then within two years be punting technology that even speech greats like Nuance couldn’t seem to muster.  Then there are reports from customers (and evidence from reporters) that over the last 12 months the accuracy has declined to such a poor level that it is often not worth using.  Technology rarely gets worse over time, so this would indicate a problem with some other resource, which seems to co-incidentally tally with their recent exponential growth in subscriber numbers.

So, leaving aside the rather dull news that messages are sent outside of the EEA for transcription, why does it matter how it works, so long as it does? Or at least did…

Well I suppose people may be justifiably upset that their messages are being heard by a third party without their knowledge or permission, although I haven’t heard any reports of customers being blackmailed by the call centre staff in question.  Or perhaps it shakes your faith in technology, which is rather pathetic.

But the really puzzling thing is why didn’t SpinVox come clean about this from the start.  According to a tweet by Rory C-J yesterday their PR company is still denying it is true. The investors who have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the company must also be complicit in this deceit because surely SpinVix couldna and wouldna hidden it from them? My company was involved in a fairly major project with SpinVox about 18 months ago, and in discussions with their senior management they never mentioned it once.  They gave us ridiculously long SLAs to return the transcriptions, but insisted that this was due to their processing resources being stretched at that particular time.

So why never mention the human side of their service?  The vanity of a high-profile serial entreprener?  The fear of low adoption due to privacy concerns?  Not wishing to draw attention to the DPA issues?  Whatever the reason(s), and regardless of how ‘obvious’ it has always been, it smacks of deception and now sadly threatens to derail what until recently looked like a potential British success story.  And perhaps this has now been infected by the classic British disease of success-bashing from the media.

Oh, and by the way spare a thought for poor James Whatley, PR tweeter extraordinaire for SpinVox.  One of his last tweets, written two days before the story broke, was

Right, we’re headed up into the Big Horn Mountains for a few days. Back Friday. Taking the satphone, but no guarantee of updates… Eep!

Bet the poor guy has a ton of voicemails to come back to…