The Jeff Pulver Blog: SpinVox - A "Purple Services" Company

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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.)

Posted by jeff on May 31, 2006 05:16 AM | Permalink

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SPINVOX...how do they do that?

I was a team leader at one of the many houses around the world that
employ agents to convert your
messages, from voicemail to text.

I say was, as I have now lost my job as are many of my family and close friends.

Did I perform poorly, no, I was consistently good hence my elevation
to escalation manager
What changed you may ask; a number of months ago my employer was put
under the new and improved and vastly "FAIR"
SpinVox contract. My employer tells me that they will have no choice
but to amend the terms of my employment contract to
match the terms of the contract that they became subject to.

So, with some fear and apprehension I enter the plush meeting room to
discuss the terms of this new and improved , risk and reward
contract and I leave a broken woman, knowing that although there is a
minimum wage in the country where I work from, come the
end of the month, the unachievable parameters, just to be paid let
alone bonused, will be the cause of my demise.

My departure will not be by my own hand it will be by the hand of my
employer, who I actually get along with well, they however
have no choice but to fire agents who do not meet the SpinVox
criteria. I can tell you in the 9 months that I have worked here
245 agents have been through this house processing your messages and
then being fired because you the client deemed our quality
not to be sufficient or you did not get the message swiftly enough. I
believe that at any one time there are up to 4000 out there.

When we had trainers out here training us how the voicemail to text
application (Tenzing) worked they told us of a SpinVox
division in Ireland that sit there day in and day out scoring messages
that we do. How can it be possible that an Irishmen
scores South African based messages, Australian, American Canadian
English and numerous others.

Louisa Crook, Sue Emit and Esther Fortune all SpinVox employees work
in this country illegally They stay here for months at a
time teaching us the ever changing rules of the SpinVox conversion
system. This was further confirmed, by Janice Grant another
SpinVox employee who spends a lot of time with us in Umhlanga.

Every message that you have left arrives on one of our computers to be
converted, these include test messages that you leave and
the most intimate of calls between lovers and sometimes criminals.
Under an oath of secrecy we may not disclose the content of
messages, but how do you think I feel when I hear a man threatening a
daughter with death or a wife with abuse? Any normal person
would be shocked; I have become numb to this now even though it
happens with chilling frequency.

At times we receive warnings that you (Vodacom (SA), Cingular(USA),
Vodafone, Sasktel Canada and Telstra Australia that you will
be testing and are sent scripts with reams of what you may be saying
or the terms you may be using, other times we do not and if
we make one mistake we are severely reprimanded and get chastised
severely, if we convert the message in an ACR (Agent Conversion
Ratio) of 6 or more we get penalised, if we get 3 minor errors or a
major we fail the message.

We receive emails from Malcolm Walden, Simon McBeth, Janice Grant
telling our superiors that we are typing things incorrectly.
When we are told to type what we hear.

Allow me to challenge each and every one of you that may take the time
to read this; record 30 seconds of audio (read from a book
if you have to), take a stop watch and time yourself, play the audio
back and attempt to type it out, verbatim and error free in
180 seconds or less (6 x 30 seconds). You may be successful the first
time, try doing that for 6-8 hours and you will see what I
have had to endure for the last months only to be paid 30% less than
what my pitiful wage actually is, if at all...yes you read
correctly!!

Last month, I worked the whole month processed the worst kind of
messages(see below) from others, achieved a 71% quality score
and an ACR of 9.1 and was therefore not paid. Thank you for this
SpinVox, that is a whole family that will not have an income or
food for the month of December now! I shall have to take a loan to get
myself to interviews now.

I thought you were good, I hear you say, well given that I was a team
leader there is a special level of agent that only receives
escalated messages. These are messages from agents that either do not
want to convert the content as it is offensive or the audio
quality is bad and they do not want to tarnish their scores or it is a
message that has been snatched away from another agent that
has taken to long...... is it fair for me to be penalised when I am
getting all of the more complex, filth laden, poor audio
quality messages?

The next time you receive a voice to text message and want to complain
about bad quality or a slow delivery think about the agent
that has been sitting for 6-8 hours straight, staring at a screen,
listening to audio and converting verbatim what they hear,
to give you the impression that this has been done by a very smart
machine with technology (D2 I believe they call it from what
I read on their website) that has never worked in 50 years of people
trying to get it right.

Keep at the front of your mind that your complaint may be the cause
of the agent on the other end losing their entire salary
as they may breach the tipping point of the complex matrix of
penalties SpinVox have leveraged against the Quality Control
Houses* and then there will be more hungry families that will not eat
and provide for their loved ones and I suspect that
SpinVox would have been paid and are therefore printing money as the
saying goes as they control the data and therefore give a
client what they need to see so that they can enjoy maximum payment
and manipulate our data so that we are paid the least.

On many occasions I have asked my employer to prove the integrity of
the reports we receive and to this day, SpinVox have denied
the request or so my employer has led me to believe. I am sure that
SpinVox does not have these sorts of penalties enforced on
them do they?

Perhaps there is a network operator or client out Alltel, Vodacom,
Cincinnati Bell, Telstra, Sasktel or Vodafone any of you
out there that will be bold enough to tell me what your contract terms
are, so that I know how badly my employer and I have
really been treated and just how severe and deep the exploitation of
me and my people runs at the expense of corporate profits?

Sometimes I think it may be better to go back to the sweat shops and
make clothes or shoes, why have I, at great sacrifice,
taken the efforts to educate myself and try to lift myself out of this
life of poverty. I am not complaining, I do not believe
that in a world where we are all human beings and strive for fairness
and some sort of equality that persons with great pride and
dignity can be treated and exploited for profit in this
way...............I hope you vote with your hearts and minds in your
boardrooms when deciding on whether to take this product on or not and
take some cognisance of the social responsibility that
is demanded of you before agreeing to proceed with greed for profits
ahead of the pain and suffering of others that are at the
other end of the supply chain.

Christina Domecq, Nick Goldson, Daniel Doulton, Nik Mellor, Louisa
Cooke, Janice Grant, Simon Mc Beth, Malcolm Walden, Sue Emit
and all the staff in Marlow that tried to teach us how to be a sweat
shop, I hope that you do not ever have to endure the pain
and suffering my small family and I endured this Christmas with my
heavily reduced salary and ending up jobless. Thank you very
much for my Christmas present I will try and bring my children up one
day to help fellow man and not to try and screw them.
I pray to God you and your family never have the experience that you
are putting so many South Africans and other exploited
citizens of other countries round the world.

I will leave a forwarding address to a gmail account that if there is
any information required by you corporates out there
that are willing to stop this illegal action I will gladly donate my
time and information. I was forced to sign a confidentiality
agreement with these people, but I am happy to say that I did not sign
mine. I am free from any legal binding to SpinVox and
their henchmen. I am going to try and personally contact current and
Ex SpinVox agents in South Africa and get them to petition and then
take this to the highest levels of government.

I want them to stop your organisation from exploiting South Africa. I
will go to the ANC human rights division who want to
ensure atrocities and exploitation like this does not happen.

Signed:

A previously disadvantaged individual but freshly liberated and now
ex-employee of the oppressive regime driven and created by that
fabulous and brainwashed team that call themselves SpinVox and who
believed that they would be able to gag us all from disclosing
their sordid secrets of exploitation and greed and supposed technical wizardry.

(*the euphemistic term used for a collection of agents converting your
messages in a centralised location)

I will be sending a copy of this email to websites around the world
that you have boldly advertised yourself on as being a fantastic
company. I have googled your company and have found the below
mentioned people that I would like to tell how you lie. I have lost
everything and have nothing further to lose I want you to know how it
feels to be treated unfairly so i will share my story with these
people.

Posted by: SpinVox Conversion Agent at January 9, 2009 07:01 AM

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!!!

http://www.spinvox.com/services/speakablog.php

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

May 31, 2006

SpinVox - A "Purple Services" Company

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