Spinvox is an example of a killer app
I first came into contact with Spinvox in January 2008 in the US when a mate of mine who was working for them based in the bay area showed me a voice mail from another VC friend of ours that had been transcribed by the service. As an exercise in peurile behaviour it had most of the swear words in the English language in it and it began with,"Hi I thought I'd test out Spinvox for you and see if it could decipher fxxx, sxxx, wxxx, kxxx you cxxxxxxxxx son of a bxxxx .." Well you get the point. It did a 100% accurate job without the xxx ive put here which in itself was not the point but what was profound to me was that the message was written not spoken and could be delivered to your email!For me delivering spoken messages to your email was the killer app.
Emotionally scarred by voicemail at Microsoft Limited
You see, I just hate voicemail. Ever since I worked for Microsoft Limited who had a voicemail policy that I still detest where you had to have a greeting that followed the company standard
"Hi this is <your name> from Microsoft and this <time of day> I am <what you are doing> and I will be checking my voicemail at <time you are checking it> and will get back to you no later than <time you will call>"
Not only that, but you had to change your voicemail greeting twice a day because then your manager and your callers will know you are working. And finally you had to have voicemail notifications switched on so that your phone got them immediately after you turned it on. My manager used to phone me up every day saying "Angus, are you OK, you dont seem to have changed your voicemail message this afternoon and I wondered where you were. This drove me insane especially as I didnt answer it, and the moanogram became a voicemail. I put a generic prime ministers questions type of greeting on it"Im having a number of meetings this morning and afternoon and will be checking my voicemail periodically during the working day"
He wasn't pleased. My manager and I didnt really get on but thats another story. Anyway, what I particularly hated about it was that as I got into my car my car kit would immediately, before I even left the drive to go to work, call me with a zillion messages, usually from people I didnt like, usually making my life a misery by getting me to do things I didn't want to do or reminding me of things I hadn't done. The final straw was the voicemail distribution list where team agendas for the week would be spoken by the management for what seemed like hours early on Monday morning. I was convinced they taped it on Friday and delayed its delivery to 6am Monday to make everyone more productive. The only way to deal with the actions was to sit and transcribe the voicemail into text. I lost count of the number of times, that as an email die hard product manager and collaboration specialist, I would say, "Cant you just email this to me"
One queue of work - my email inbox
Im a big user of twitter these days (@nuxnix), but email is my work queue, and having a separate work queue thats voicemail just means I dont get the voice based things done.
So thats why when I saw the printed swear word text of my friends voicemail on Spinvox I thought - this is a killer app. They dont come along often but it is.
How does Spinvox work? I asked, although at the time I didnt really care about how it worked, only that it didSo my next question was 'how does it work?'. My friend told me they had top people working on the voice to text technology and that its computerised, but obviously some words, names and languages are quite tricky and they couldnt support everything hence they were working with the technology they had and supporting and accelerating research in the field. Sometimes, he told me, the system can't transcribe the message, nothing is lost, you can always listen to it for the words or phrases that can't be identified. I asked him about Hebrew and Scousers for example having been working for an Israeli test automation company also voice mail obsessive. Both very big challenges he agreed and dialects were going to be particularly difficult.Fine, I said to him – getting most of them is good enough. I bet him it was a giant call centre with people sitting round polycom speakerphones transcribing everything and getting prizes for whoever gets the most difficult words. He said no that new technology was the key to scaling the solution and that they had world leading figures, mentioning names of some of whom I knew from my previous jobs including at Openwave System.
I couldnt disagree but I didnt review anything about the technology.
Months later - Spinvox transformed my workflow and responsivenessMonths later I bumped into Spinvox again in the UK this time, and told them I knew a good bit about the service and told them about the swearing text. They asked me what I thought of the service and I told them I thought it was a killer app and I couldn't understand why everybody didnt want it but that it probably wasnt for me as I had an iPhone. They invited me to try it out - telling me that it worked perfectly witht he iPhone just bypassing visual voicemail. Visual voicemail was pretty lame anyway so I agreed to try it out in June last year.Guess what. Im still using it.
Spinvox was a revelation for me. All my voicemails now in my email. And quickly too. With few errors, mostly names or technical jargon. It was well marketed, professionally set up, and just workd. I emailed them back in to tell them:-
"Thanks very much for the SpinVox account. I love it as it puts all my work items in the same place - my email inbox! That means I can deal with them in my own time. Im an emailer at heart and hate voicemail. My colleagues who love voicemail diatribes are grumbling but I dont care! - Im sure its thousands of people in a call centre with headphones typing :-)"
Can you see from the tone of this exact quote direct from my email in June 2008 that I thought and presumed humans were involved but I realy didnt care about the details, just that the service worked. I stil dont care. And the service still works.
I know they must escalate difficult words through some kind of workflow, and I assumed that their software just picked out the difficult phrase and sent that to a review process ultimately ending up with a person. I also knew that it must be computerised in many areas because otherwise it would simply fail to scale. In reality I could care less how thats done. I assume if somethings secret you dont put it in a voicemail anyway, just like you dont send secret things in unencrypted emails.
I prefer security by being the needle in the haystack. Who on earth is interested in my messages about what time Im going to be off the train anyway? Of course I'll show up in a search potentially made by the government, but they routinely do that today on all the Internet traffic in the UK, or at least thats what I assume. Presumably they are looking for more importnt things. Perhaps like the characters of 60's eavesdropping movies we should all say 'bomb' or 'explosion' in every voice mail just to make the GCHQ's own speech to voice technology service grind to a halt.
I really never thought anything of the privacy or data concerns. I just like the service and that it works.
Its analagous to the captcha system thats reading unreadable text by analysing readable and unreadable responses in the same captcha and brute forcing the meaning of the unreadable. Nobody there gets more than one word of unreadable text, and they also get a known word which helps give a weighting to offset the accuracy of the unknown word against the persons score. I dont know if Spinvox use this kind of approach, but it would be what I would do if I were its product manager.
Disclosure: I have a free account courtesy of Spinvox as they think Im a mover and shaker in mobile - clearly they havent seen me dance
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