SpinVox Needs Spin Doctor

(MoneyWatch)  Often, one of the selling points of tech companies, especially Web-based businesses, is the cool factor of their technology. Not only can this help bring in the early adopters, but it gives investors the sense that scaling a business and leveraging money put in should be possible. But woe unto those who put an automated face on a very labor-intensive operation. And that's where UK-based voicemail-to-text service provider SpinVox has found itself, as reports surface that potentially huge amounts of the "automated" transcription is actually done by outsourced call center typists.

Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC appears to have broken the story after speaking with a current employee and a number of former ones, as well as doing a pretty smart test:

Still wishing to be convinced that it was people not machines listening to my messages, I tried another tactic. It was suggested to me that if I recorded a message and then sent it five times in a row to my mobile, then a computer would provide the same result every time.

Well, my message (which you can hear below) was deliberately stumbling and full of quite difficult words - including my rather tricky name. But every version that came back to me in text form was radically different - and pretty inaccurate.

Yes, programmatic transcriptions should have been more or less the same. This flies in the face of the impression that the company tries to create, which you can hear in an interview with co-founder Christina Domecq (you'll need to have Real Player installed):

Spinvox is a technology business, and for most users we have worldwide, they use our service and our technology to convert their voice mails into text messages, so you don't have to grab a pen and paper. -- We began in the telecom market because that's where we can train our [speech to text] engines.

Right, you don't have to grab paper and pen because someone already has.

Apparently this was a poorly kept secret in many tech circles, according to Andrew Orlowski at The Register. But conditions are getting worse there:

In its last annual accounts for 2007, SpinVox employed over 300 people, and ran up operating expenses of ?£30.445m. Of these, $17m was marked for development and operations, $9.1m sales and marketing expenses, and $4.25m admin. The "burn rate", or net cash absorbed by operating activities, was ?£24.45m. However, it only recorded ?£2.057m revenue.

In order to save money this week, it offered to pay its staff in stock. But more significantly, in a few short months the service had deteriorated to the point where it wasn't worth a fiver a month.

Although users probably wouldn't care in principle whether transcription is done by man or machine, two issues arise. One is security. Someone, somewhere, is listening to your private messages, creating a potential issue for sensitive information.

Second, and in the short run even more important, if success means continuingly adding people rather than megabytes and server cycles, this is unlikely to be a business that can economically scale its operations, which would make getting the additional money it needs pretty difficult to do. And it will need that money, as it has launched an iPhone appas well as a version for Skype and an API to open its engine to others. Seems like enough to keep a lot of transcriptionists busy.

Image via stock.xchng user RAWKU5, site standard license.