Alltel’s new Voice2TXT service uses voice-recognition software that allows mobile phone customers to read their voicemail messages as text messages. Voice2TXT costs $4.99 a month and still has the option to listen to messages as usual.
“It’ll appeal to a broad customer base … people who are in meetings quite regularly and can’t take a phone call — it’s very useful in those settings,” said Wade McGill, Alltel’s senior vice president of product management.
The technology was developed by the British company SpinVox. It works on any Alltel cell phone that can receive text messages.
“It was one of those services that once you get it, you don’t want to give it up,” McGill said, describing the reaction of a test group.
SpinVox said its Voice Message Conversion System, which converts messages in English, French, Spanish and German, eliminates the need to search for a pen to write down the details of a message or navigate through a voicemail service.
“Voice2TXT as delivered by SpinVox eliminates the frustrations with dialing into voicemail by offering a discreet, efficient alternative,” said Christina Domecq, co-founder and chief executive of SpinVox.
I don’t think this service is for everybody but if you get a lot of voicemails with detailed information it might be worth the $4.99 fee. I find myself having to listen to messages more than once when there is a phone number or other specific information that needs to be written down.
I’d love to believe in SpinVox’s revolutionary product, but what’s little-reported is that your message is zapped off to Indian call centers, where a human listens to it and types it out before sending it out to the recipient. ALL HUMAN. It also take 3-5 minutes before a message is delivered. Until I learned about the human angle, I couldn’t figure out why my messages took so long to be delivered…..
Comment by Keith Chosen — December 17, 2007 @ 12:16 pm
Unfortunately, Keith’s comments are very wide of the mark. SpinVox has actually developed a sophisticated learning system called the Voice Message Conversion System which carries out automatically by computer the majority of SpinVox voice to text conversions. Messages are converted by machine; humans are only involved to help train the intelligent system to improve its speed and accuracy (although SpinVox users do report already 97 per cent accuracy where other automated services deliver only the gist of what is said).
So, when the system encounters a word or phrase its does not know or understand, it is able to refer to a specialist in the SpinVox language laboratory for assistance. The human then trains the system so that word or phrase becomes known to the VMCS for future use. In that way, the VMCS is constantly evolving and learning, increasing in accuracy and speed with each conversion.
Comment by Jonathan Simnett — December 17, 2007 @ 12:47 pm
Keith, your last comment is inaccurate. SpinVox messages are converted by a sophisticated learning system, developed in-house, called the Voice Message Conversion System, which automatically carries out the majority of conversions. When the system encounters a word or phrase its does not know or understand, or if there is an abundance of background noise when the message in being left, it is able to refer to a human for assistance. The human then trains the system so that word or phrase becomes known to the VMCS for future use. But the important thing to understand is that messages are converted by the VMCS, not by humans.
Comment by Greg — December 18, 2007 @ 8:33 am