Well Speech Heads, this was a long time coming, but here it is! OUR SPINVOX REVIEW!

Some ground rules before we begin:

Pussyfootin’ Provisos and Liability Claims

Trial Version

The SpinVox service I was using was a trial version. It basically worked through call forwarding, sending all my missed calls to SpinVox for transcription and using a third-party aggregator to send them back to me as texts/emails. If I wanted to listen to the messages, I had to call SpinVox directly. When you use SpinVox natively, the service works through a carrier’s existing channels. So for the most part you don’t feel its presence as much as I did.

SpinVox v. Nuance

Doubtlessly, this review will draw some comparisons to our Nuance VM2T review. The devious of you out there will be trying to piece together which one I think is better. Sorry to disappoint, I won’t be coming down with any definitive pronouncements on that count. I’m afraid those betting stubs you bought are going to be worthless.

For the purposes of our blog product reviews we’ve very purposefully eschewed using any kind of numerical value system-in part because that system is just untenable long term for the blog. Technology will change and, moreover, numbers can be used to suggest comparisons between features that we never intended to compare. For a lot of the same reasons, when we do the Speech Industry Awards (SpeechTek 2009, HOLLA!) we have our judges rate vendors overall rather than dealing with thickly overgrown forest individual products.

Furthermore, for the purposes of this Thrilla in Manila: VM2T v. SpinVox, the two are only comparable so far. Like with SpinVox, when I test drove the Nuance service it was just a demo version that didn’t actually deliver texts to my phone. I don’t really have a great feel for the ins and outs of delivery times or the niceties of interface of either. Given that, the only point of comparison between the two that one could feasibly draw is between the respective engine’s recognition accuracy.

The Equipment

Another disclosure: the mobile phone used throughout this review was a Samsung SCH-U540. My phone, pictured here can be described as pretty much the featurest of feature phones. This phone is so feature, and this is not a joke, that when I was talking to a vendor about usability tests on mobile devices, they told me they test on a “full gamut of phones.” At the high end they tested their software some suped BlackBerry, probably capable of fielding a line drive while processing six terabytes of cancer research, and on the low end, they used a phone that the guy called, “as nothing as you can probably get.” The low phone in question? My exact phone.

So bear that in mind when you read through.

And now…

The Review:

Delivery and Some First Results

One of the immediately cool things I noticed about the service is that when I got a message it appeared as a text from the number that called me. Other than “spoken through SpinVox” appearing at the end of each message, they looked exactly like a text from the caller. That makes it really easy to call or text somebody back without having to dig up their number or dial anything. And hey, if the number is in your address book, you’ll know who it’s from before you even crack the message open. Beats cycling through a bunch of messages you have no need to hear, no? Special added bonus, you can also set up your SpinVox account to send a copy to your email!

There were, however, some issues that I encountered in my use of the service. One was with the delay in delivery of messages. How fast they made it from utterance to text seemed to vary anywhere from a couple minutes to as many as fifteen. Some were also dropped while others were delivered in random chronological order. I don’t know how much I can attribute this to my own carrier’s network or SpinVox, but I can provide an example of where things went wrong. (more…)

Speech Heads, it’s a beautiful thing when speech providers compete.

Post our review on Nuance’s VM2T, SpinVox (perhaps a little jealous) wrote me to ask me to the dance—-the speech dance that is. In a matter of days, I’ll begin trying out their service. We’re going to be giving it the full treatment, subjecting it to rigors of my brother Adam B.’s near insane rambling messages, putting it in the wringer of Shakespearean English, pushing it through the Danger Room of the busy New York City streets, and springing a couple of unexpected tests on it.

Full results to come, Speech Heads! Stay tuned! Same speech-time, same speech-channel!

Speech Heads, after many a voicemail message and perilously rigorous scientific testing, we’re finally ready to give you STBlog’s assessment of Nuance’s VM2T (voicemail-to-text) client.

How the review breaks down

A couple weeks ago, I had a briefing with Nuance Communications about setting the service up where they explained the lay of the land. They explained that version I would be testing is a little bit different from the one you’ll find out in the wilds of market. As we’ve mentioned before, Nuance’s marketing strategy with VM2T is to distribute through its partners–in this case carriers. Nuance provides the underlying technology to its partners, but each iteration is likely to look a little different according to those partners’ needs. The version I was using was hosted directly by Nuance, so interface specifics probably wouldn’t bear any relation to what most end-users will see.

For one, I had to set up a forwarding service to use it which an end-user would never have to do. For two, all of the messages were emailed to me rather than sent as text messages. In real deployments, Sean Brown, product manager for mobile applications at Nuance, assured me the messages will be sent as SMS texts under most carriers. Also varying from provider to provider are settings for live agent intervention. Depending on what a provider wants to pay for/provide they may bring in real people to clean up the texts if a message scores low-confidence.

All that said, the recognition engine (Dragon 10) is identical to the one that carriers will be using, so we focussed on that for the purposes of this review.

The process began when I set up my account, dialing a number that would, from that brave moment on, forward all my voicemails past my provider’s system to Nuance VM2T HQ. There, they’d be subjected to pinch-and-pull of Nuance’s automated recognition, possible human oversight depending on the strength or weakness of  confidence scores, and spat back out to my email as a text with a .wav of the message attached for review. If the system was unable recognize what was said, it would be indicated this with [...]. Likewise, if it didn’t have high confidence and guessed a word it would write [?] after it.

The results

(more…)

Whoa. Remember when IBM promised they would spend $100 million on UC software? Well today, British voicemail-to-text provider SpinVox got news that they raised $100 million in funding from Goldman Sachs and other investors. According to an article from CNet.com, this $100 million is only part of the company’s funding — so far they have raised $200 million total, including this latest round.

SpinVox says it plans to increase the number of countries and languages serviced by its VTT software, as well as form more partnerships with companies like Skype, and other mobile providers. What does all this mean for the company’s long-term future? Well, according to that same article, SpinVox’s CEO, Christina Domecq, “isn’t looking for a buyout or an IPO, but is keeping her options open.” Indeed.