Spinvox
Guy Kawasaki calls Spinvox "utterly indispensable." Fred Wilson calls Simulscribe "life-changing." David Pogue says that about both of them. So why have so few people heard of them?
I’ve been using Spinvox for two months. Spinvox replaces my carrier’s voicemail system. For callers there is no change, but Spinvox converts their voice messages from speech to text and sends the transcript to me via email and SMS. It is so good that I haven’t listened to a voicemail since and with any luck I never will again. Now it takes seconds to check my voicemail, I can do so during a meeting, I know which messages are important, and if the caller leaves a number I can just click on it instead of scrambling for pen and paper and then typing it in. If voicemail is a big part of your life, then Spinvox is indeed life-changing.
So much for the iPhone’s ‘visual voicemail’, the feature that allows you to see who has left voicemail messages and to listen to them separately. Steve Jobs claimed that this required tight
integration with a network operator, justifying Apple’s
exclusive relationship with Cingular. Spinvox is far better than random
access to your regular voicemail and far more deserving of the name
visual voicemail. And like every other great idea online, it works just
fine at the edge of the network.
Spinvox was founded in 2003, won several awards in 2005, and won a major innovation award at 3GSM last year. But they did not announce their first carrier customer - Vodafone - until 3GSM this year. Why aren’t they bigger than Elvis?
The problem is that carriers charge us for voicemail by the minute. Lots of companies waste our time. It usually costs them money. Only mobile carriers charge us for wasting our time. In the US we spend almost 100 billion minutes each year leaving or listening to voicemail.
The European market is more complicated. Charges for voicemail vary from one carrier and country to the next. On average mobile phone calls are much more expensive. Only the calling party pays: incoming phone calls are free. Since it costs nothing to receive a call, but it costs
money to return a voicemail, a lot of people would rather
miss a call - betting that the caller will try again if it’s
important - than activate their voicemail and be expected to return messages. Hence fewer than 50% of subscribers activate voicemail.
It never seems to occur to zero-sum minute-pinching carriers that if voicemail were more efficient, we might make more phone calls.
Since I started using Spinvox I return voicemail messages more often
because I get to check them before they’re stale. If everyone else had
Spinvox, I would be more inclined to leave voicemail messages,
confident that they were going to be returned. (Today when I
reach voicemail I usually hang up and write an email instead. You pay
to listen to the date and time that I called, a click, nothing, and
then the sound of me hanging up.)
Maybe carriers won’t make
back from increased call and text message volume what they give up in
voicemail minutes. Here’s another idea: they should adopt
Spinvox just to make their customers happy.
Sadly, that is not how the telecom industry works. Mobile carriers have no idea how to retain subscribers: they grew so fast that they didn’t need to worry about it. If a new service doesn’t pay for itself, it
doesn’t get launched. Don’t expect your carrier to launch Spinvox or Simulscribe anytime soon. But you can sign up for either at the companies’ web sites. Spinvox is offering a free trial in the US; Simulscribe charges $9.95 per month for 40 messages and $0.25 per message after that.
Your carrier will happily charge you for forwarding your calls.
March 3rd, 2007 at 9:25 pm
thx for the nuance info and spinvox over at avc
h
March 7th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
I’m going to sign up for an account now.
March 14th, 2007 at 4:56 am
The likely reason that SpinVox isn’t better known and isn’t being rolled out is because it is not scalable; SpinVox uses human agents (for transcription) and not speech recognition.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20060223502.html
Jason replies:
Thanks, I should have addressed this in my post. How much Spinvox relies on human transcription is not clear. The patent was filed in the US two years ago; two years is a long time at any startup; and many companies file patents on techniques that they never end up using anyway. But since the largest carrier in the UK, Vodafone, has now decided to launch Spinvox, either they have switched over to an automated system (or an automated system that fails over to humans), or they have satisfied Vodafone that a ‘Mechanical Turk’ approach is scalable.
April 5th, 2007 at 5:49 am
Spinvox’s website and signup process need a lot of work. I tried to sign up two weeks ago and no joy. I just tried again, let’s see what happens.
April 8th, 2007 at 2:58 am
the comment on carrier profitability and their approach to launching services (or not) made me chuckle…as i was reading i was thinking of the 700 basis point drop in vodafone UK EBIT in the past two years…but it seems that Arun Sarin (a bit too close to Saurin? Lord of the Rings?…ok that was poor…) may have been slightly more forward thinking…D
July 13th, 2007 at 12:41 am
All, I say again, ALL Spinvox transcription is carried out by human agents, based in Ireland, India and other places. Nothing is transcribed by computer. So if you’re happy to have strangers reading your personal mail, go ahead and sign up. If you don’t want anyone else to know, stick to voicemail. It is not unscalable but scaling up is difficult when you are testing and training people to use an unfamiliar system in what in a lot of cases, is not their first or even second language. If you use the system, don’t be suprised if familiar names are transcribed into Indian names.
July 13th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Since I first wrote this post, I have spoken to an executive at Spinvox who gave me an overview of their system, confidentially. Only some of the transcription is handled by humans. Either he was lying, or you are mistaken. What is the source of your information?
August 3rd, 2007 at 2:34 am
All messages are transcribed by humans - I know, I used to do it. Using their application called Tenzing (used to be called Fruitbat). It downloads the voicemails, allows the operator to listen and type and then sends it to the Spinvox servers. Spinvox will appear to be in a better technological position if they convince the world they have transcription software but the sad truth is, it is not possible at this time. How long does it take to set up voice recognition software on your personal computer, imagine scaling this up for every accent and multiple languages - it’s not possible at this time.
Spinvox are a very aptly titled company given the amount of ’spin’ they generate keeping their biggest secret, secret.
August 7th, 2007 at 4:35 am
I saw some info around the fact they have loads of patents for technology called VMCS. A friend of mine has it and i think its a great idea. I am not really bothered by how its done. I saw that its going to be available on Skype which is brilliant…someone can leave me a message on skype and i will get it delivered to my phone…now thats really useful!
September 28th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
I have had simulscribe for the last 5 months on an unlimited plan for $49.95 a month and I can honestly say it has been life changing. I cant stand listening to tedious voicemails and rarely did I get through the 20-40+ that are left every day. With simulscribe I dont have to anymore. Its an awesome product and its well worth the money. I wonder when google is going to copy the service….
October 1st, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Imagine combining this service with the Acappella Conference Audio Recorder (http://www.acappella.com.au ) and getting your multi-party telephone conference calls transcribed and emailed to each “attendee”… Now that would be cool…