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Spinvox finds its voice
Do you struggle to decipher garbled voicemail messages? Would you love to update your blog without the effort of typing? Andrew Stucken investigates a new voice-to-text service
Ever wished you could send yourself a memo at any time before the thought slips your mind?
Help is at hand. A British company is offering an ingenious set of ground-breaking services for mobile phones. Let's take a look at SpinVox:
What is SpinVox? See www.spinvox.com for this voice-to-text system that takes speech recognition to new levels.
Five of its six offerings are free:
- Blog - update blogs using your voice. SpinVox converts them to text and publishes them for you. Yes, really.
- Memo - create memos by speaking them into your phone. SpinVox sends them to you as emails minutes later.
- Blast - lets you create a list of contacts on the SpinVox website. You can then send a text message simultaneously to all your contacts by speaking it into your phone.
- Social Networks - speak an update onto your site using Spinvox by dialling a dedicated number.
- Text – sick of typing messages into your mobile phone? Spinvox can do the hard work for you by converting your voice message to text.
- Voicemail – the juiciest application. Install SpinVox and it effectively takes over your mailbox. All voicemail messages left for you are converted into text messages. An option meanwhile exists to listen to the original audio, if you wish.
All options are provided on free trial for a few days, although some mobile networks may not carry all six.
Voicemail then rolls over to £5 per month, or per 20 conversions, whichever comes sooner. The other services however will remain free.
No less a wordsmith than Stephen Fry is a fan and has called Spinvox "a most extraordinary service", praising its voice recognition capabilities.
They are indeed impressive. Anyone familiar with the established software will know the laborious fine-tuning need to train it to your voice. Not so Spinvox. It adjusted straight away to me when I sent myself a test message – word perfect.
To test the service for yourself go to www.spinvox.com and sign up for a free trial. Remember to enter your mobile as an international number (e.g. 447812 etc.). And do check when your trial ends to avoid paying unwanted charges on the voicemail to text option, if you decide not to keep it.
Although by that time you might not want to be parted.
