So I've been hearing a lot about SpinVox recently... an interesting startup that's on the market (i.e. courting acquisition) and provides voicemail transcription services (i.e. you forward your unanswered calls to them instead of your operator's voicemail, and you get an email w/ the message text).
There's been a lot of discussion around whether SpinVox is powered by super-smart software, or a bunch of people in a room transcribing your notes. It's curious that the company is seemingly so tight-lipped about this.
Anyway, I'm betting it's a bunch of people in a room... I sent a friend a voicemail a few minutes ago with a bit of a test inspired by Daniel Gilbert's fantastic book "Stumbling on Happiness"... "I managed to get the peel from an orange stuck to the heel of my shoe." Except that each *eel word was *cough*-eel ... Now, software's going to have a pretty difficult time using the words orange and shoe after the fact to disambiguate the words... something a human being would do without even realizing they'd done it. SpinVox nailed it. It also wrote my name wrong but had a "(?)" after it... something that software probably wouldn't be smart enough to guess (i.e. the wrong guess it took at my name wasn't a common name... which is what you'd expect software to do)...
So... I'm sure we'll all find out eventually how SpinVox does their thing... but for the moment, I'm betting (and hey, I'd *love* to be proved wrong on this one) it's a bunch of folks listening to and transcribing your messages. Too bad. It'd be cool for a company to finally crack the problem of speaker independent voice recognition on large dictionaries... but it seems that it'll still be an unsolved problem for at least a while longer.
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