SpinVox: Demo Day
Along with a number of other bloggers and ‘proper’ journalists we went to SpinVox HQ in Marlow yesterday to get ‘hands on’ and ‘see for ourselves’. The session – initially planned to run for an hour – wrapped up after around 90 minutes with the arrival of a second group who were to see the same presentation.
Please see this post for information about The Really Mobile Project co-founder James Whatley’s position with SpinVox and his current leave-of-absence from The Really Mobile Project. We have made a detailed disclosure statement in this post. If you are concerned this post is affected by a conflict of interest for the authors, other coverage of the session Ben and Dan attended is available from Techcrunch UK and The Register.
We’ve included far more detail below, but for the attention-deficit crowd here are the key points:
- The presentation and demo made no attempt to address the most serious allegations against SpinVox.
- The demo, even under controlled circumstances, failed to demonstrate anything more than very basic automated transcription. Most messages went to the human transcriber, whole.
- The system we saw showed a ‘build date’ of 29th July so may not be one that has transcribed many (if any) real customers’ messages.
SpinVox, to us, looks to have developed a very competent tool to assist human transcribers. Nothing we were shown convinced us the automatic speech recognition added much benefit at all.
We are amazed they believed this demonstration would support their claims and even more amazed they chose only to focus on the technical.
The longer version…
The event had been billed as a technical demonstration and we felt increasingly uneasy as we chatted in the taxi there. Having drawn-up a list of questions from readers and other coverage, very few of the key issues really related to ‘how it works’. Far larger concerns were security, scalability, the state of the business and – crucially – the question ‘why has this happened?’ In a world of disgruntled ex-employees and aggressive competitors, why was SpinVox the one landing all the negative press in some of the largest mainstream media?
What did we see?
Presenting, Rob Wheatley the CIO, placed a significant emphasis on the level of detail he was about to share with us. It was, he said, more than had ever been released outside of an NDA – we shouldn’t take pictures of the slides or record the session. We didn’t, but I’m at a loss as to why this restriction was applied – it served only to make collecting an accurate record of what happen more difficult…
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