Spinvox am I the only person who is not suprised?

Posted by Kieran on July 23, 2009 under Misc | Be the First to Comment

Lots of negative press today for Spinvox mainly coming from the BBC and Moconews. This strikes me a little odd, as whilst I have always felt that if Spinvox’s voice recognition software was half as good as the claims made about it, they would not be dealing with mobile carriers and consumers and only charging £5 a month for the service, when the medical and legal professions would pay vast sums for this service and not need to be “sold” the product, as they already know the problem exists.

The fact that it has come as a shock to people, must only be people who have never used the service as it was always plainly apparent that Spinvox were using the mechanical turk to achieve a lot of their message transactions. This makes me laugh much like the uproar a few years ago when it was “revealed” that the dictionary corner on Countdown were getting assistance from other people in the studio team! I am fairly sure Goldman Sachs and Spinvoxes other investors would have been able to do simple calculations as to whether the amount of people needed to transcribe the messages to text was above the break even point and therefore the business could scale.

For all the bad press it has received today, the simple fact is that they had an innovative service people were willing to pay for – unlike Twitter, Facebook etc which are struggling to find meaningful revenue streams from their user base. They have however misled the press and potential customers as to the power of their D2 technology and maybe this is why people feel their expectations have been betrayed.