SpinVox co-founder explains voice-to-blog service

Posted 26 April 2007 10:51am by Graham Charlton with 4 comments

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SpinVox is a UK company which provides a range of voice-to-text services, primarily its Spin my Vmail service, which converts voicemails into text messages.

Spin my Blog, which SpinVox launched earlier this year, uses the company's patented Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS) to allow bloggers to post articles from their phones.

If it catches on, the service could open greater possibilities in terms of citizen journalism and social networking, allowing anyone with a phone to write a blog post.

The accuracy of transcription of voice to text is impressive too - as Daniel says below, it is about 97% accurate, and also has the ability to learn new words over time.

We caught up with co-founder and VP of strategy Daniel Doulton to talk about the service...

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Can you summarise how SpinVox works?

The major products we offer are: Spin my Vmail, which converts voicemail messages into text; Spin my Blog, which allows you to blog from anywhere; and Spin my Memo, which allows you to dictate notes and memos and have them delivered into your inbox.

The service works with any network and any handset, and it is compatible with Skype.

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Can you explain how a user posts to their blog using it?

All the blogger needs to do is call a number and speak the message into it, this is then automatically converted into a blog post. Each account comes with a PIN number, which can be shared with other bloggers.

Most interesting things happen in the real world. The value of this service is that it allows you to capture the moment there and then.

In addition, with this product, you don’t even need to know anything about computers to write a blog post, so it opens up blogging to the non-technical. With this, even my Gran can blog.

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How accurate is the speech recognition technology? How does it deal with different accents?

The technology is rated to be 97% accurate by our users, the system will flag any word it doesn’t understand and can learn new words and accents over time.

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What languages is the service available in?

English, Spanish, French and German.

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Which blogging platforms does the service support?

Most major platforms – Six Apart, TypePad, Live Journal. We have a continuous project to integrate SpinmyBlog into as many blogging platforms as possible.

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How many are in the SpinVox team?

There are 200 in the team now, having started out with just two people back in 2003.

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How many users does SpinVox have?

Overall the services have over 140,000 users, most of which are using Spin my Vmail. Several hundred are using the blogging tool.

In addition, we have a number of deals to be announced in the next two months related to our blogging products.

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