SpinVox: Now All I Want Is Noodles

For the longest time, the only United Kingdom company that I wished was in the United States was Wagamama because I love noodles. (Alas, it’s finally coming to Boston, but I go to London more often than Boston.)

My list of UK-envy companies has doubled because SpinVox gave me an account. This company’s service converts voicemail to text and then sends the text to your phone or email account. Now I don’t have to listen to voicemails at 650-555-1212. I just read the email at guy@garage.com or get a text message.

At first I was skeptical about the accuracy of the conversion, but I’ve been very impressed. Here’s an example. I left myself a voicemail of the previous paragraph, and this is the unedited text that was sent to my email address:

“My list of UK handy (?) companies has doubled, because SpinVox gave me an account. This company service converts voicemail to text & then sends the text to your phone or email account. Now I don’t have to listen to voicemails at 6505551212. I just read the email at guy@garage.com or get a text message.”

There are roughly 250 million cell phones in the US, and they generate roughly 90,000,000,000 voicemails (250 million x 30 voicemails/month x 12 months). And like any good entrepreneur knows, you only need to get 1% of a market to be successful. :-)

The bad news about SpinVox is that it’s not yet available in the United States. As you can imagine, the company is conducting trials and discussions with carriers all over the world, so if you know any executives at carriers, you should urge them to add the service.

I am a simple man: I just want to eat noodles at a Wagamama in Palo Alto while receiving the text of voicemails. I’m half way there, and I may never answer my phone again.

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Comments

[John Dodds]

While on the infamous Scoble pub crawl last week, I was told that the transcription is done by humans not technology and, if that is true, I imagine that potential privacy issues might concern you.

[Ian Eiloart]

Hey, if you're going to use the "555" area code to avoid publicising real phone numbers, then use the "example.com" email domain which is reserved for the same purpose.

see rfc2606, section 3

[Jordan Mitchell]

Mmmmm ... Wagamama. I'm with you, having recently moved back to Seattle from London. I ate Wagamama at least once per week.

[Anand]

Well spinvox was reviewed by techcrunch way back in May 2006 and a similar service but that converts a voicemail to mp3 is gotvoice.com..
both reviewed by techcrunch : http://tinyurl.com/yh373p

*************

Anand,

SpinVox was mentioned by TechCrunch. Michael has not yet used it. I am using it.

Thanks,

Guy

[jeff barson]

I use copytalk in almost exactly the opposite way, to call in to post to my blog: http://www.nimbleit.squarespace.com/the-blog/2006/7/3/post-directly-to-your-blog-using-the-ultimate-speech-recognition.html

I think they use low cost labor in India to transcribe.

[Chris]

How can I concentrate on SpinVox when the same post mentions Wagamama??? Been to one in London - great place! Long tables, orders being radio'd in, great atmosphere. A lot of interesting things going for it - think there is probably a case study in there somewhere re. branding...

[Joe Suh]

I recently blogged about the number of filters we're adding to our phones - voicemails, caller id's, and now voice-to-text! The goal seems to be to NOT answer our phones anymore...

Long after network effects kick in and everyone is on the network (whether it be phones, fax machines, or myspace), we build up immunities and filters to these services. We want to be reachable but not bothered, and thus begin an arms race of filtering out the spam and noise.

ps. Guy, for your noodles, I'd recommend Ryowa in Mountain View :)

[Kempton]

I took a quick look at a few reviews and it is an interesting service, quite useful in many cases. (I thought someone actually transcript the voicemail but it seems like it is automatically converted by machine.)

Mind you, I can see some special messages where I want to hear the voice and the tone of how a message is being left. And in those case, it will be good to refer back to the original voicemail.

Anyway, this seems like a neat service assuming the accuracy rate is as advertised. Speaker independent voice recognition in noisy environment used to be a big challenge, so may be people in SpinVox has it sorted out. Neat.

[Michael Jensen]

I'd be interested in how SpinVox handles names of people, which would be probably the most important part of the message. It sounds like the phone number and email address were okay, but what if it was something like a university email account, axybc9@someschool.edu.

Love your blog!