I’d rather ignored Spinvox since I wasn’t sure that the voice-to-text technology was ready to receive voicemails (that, let’s face it, often have peculiar acronyms, words and accents). However, a number of friends are using Spinvox and swear by it. Admittedly, they’re either head hunters (large volume of calls, screening etc) or tech types (who would rather not speak to anyone at the best of times) but to be fair the conversions they’ve received have been pretty good.
Allegedly, the conversion is by dint of humanoids, listening and transcribing to the VM recording, but their website makes no mention of the mechanism. The human touch could explain the accuracy – as one friend mentioned, the transcript accurately reflected a mumbling, drunk Welshman in a cab… Harsh.
Anyhoo, their latest product extension is voice to blog. Nice idea to file short pieces quickly, although I’m not sure I’d trust spellchecking, linking and suchlike to a voice interface. I can imagine ‘posting’ a blog entry only to discover an embarrassing typo a little while after Google indexes the blog…
That said, the joy of being able to huddle in a corner and pretend that you’re reading your scoop “down the wire” to the expectant news desk (like a hack in a 1950s movie) is just too great – I’m going to have to try this!
Aside from this implementation though it’s good to see asynchronous voice interfaces being developed, especially while so much attention is lavished on the visual and the ‘battle of the gooeys’.