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May 31, 2006
SpinVox - A "Purple Services" Company
While I was in Stockholm for VON Europe Spring 2006, I spoke with a number of people about the state of vXML and how far speech to text and text to speech systems have advanced over the years. During these conversations I spoke about a new service I was waiting to see emerge which would in effect would run a speech-to-text algorithm against a recorded voicemail and then either email the text of the message to the intended recipient and/or turn around and send the message it to out as a SMS. It turns out that such a service already exists for mobile phone subscribers and it is being offered by Spinvox. I learned about Spinvox from a recent Oliver Starr post on MobileCrunch.
While SpinVox is offering such a service for voicemail on mobile phones, if SpinVox were to expand their set of supported platforms and partner with voice over broadband service providers, the SpinVox service would be a big hit in the voice over broadband space. This way instead of having .wav files sent to my email, my messages could be emailed to me or sent to me via SMS to my cell phone. And then why limit this to just subscribers of mobile phones and broadband IP phones? The SpinVox service would be great for anyone who has a legacy PSTN line as long as the customer had an email address and/or cell phone to SMS their voicemail message to. In fact, I could see the SpinVox service being something that would end up paying extra for, if it meant that I no longer needed to dial a number to check for voicemail, and all messages received just appeared in my email inbox. At work I have the luxury of having such a service in place but it requires a human. SpinVox for Enterprise Voicemail could be a huge hit.
At the moment it is up to the executive team at SpinVox to recognize these opportunities, prioritize them and find the appropriate service provider customers to trial such a service. And if SpinVox doesn't act quickly, I'm sure that in less than a year, SpinVox competitors who read this blog will start to appear who will be offering similar services.
Done properly, a service like SpinVox could help redefine the end user expectation for what "Voice mail" in 2006 really is.
I like the idea behind SpinVox service because it represents an application that leverages IP Communications based infrastructure and is a good example of what I would call a "Purple Services" company.
It is great to see innovation happening in an environment that otherwise has not seen much innovative for quite some time.
Tags: MobileCrunch, SpinVox, Oliver Starr, Voip, Jeff Pulver
(c) 2006 Jeff Pulver. All Rights Reserved.
(This blog posting is copyright protected by Jeff Pulver. Portions of this blog posting may be quoted or abstracted if attributed.)
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Posted by jeff on May 31, 2006 05:16 AM | Permalink
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Comments
The only problem with SpinVox is that it doesn't use speech recognition technology to do this, it uses humans, as is clear from their patent:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20060223502.html
So, perhaps not the most scalable of businesses?
Posted by: ScamVox at March 14, 2007 07:19 AM
I read the Blog above with interest about SpinVox and went on to thier site - unbelievably they now do mobile blogging - where you speak your blog - they really are keeping up with the times!!!
For real - check it out!!!
Posted by: Michael W at February 1, 2007 03:27 PM
Jeff,
leave it to you to come up with yet another multi-million dollar business idea from someone's blog post on an existing business. If there's an award for most creative entrepreneur you'd surely be among the top contenders.
Thanks, by the way for reading MobileCrunch. The linkback was sincerely appreciated.
Oliver
Mobilecrunch.com
PS: how goes the latest startup?
Posted by: Oliver Starr at June 1, 2006 06:58 AM