Voicemail-to-SMS company broadens focus
Spinvox, the UK business best known for converting mobile voicemail to texts, has hired speech expert Tony Robinson to head up its Advanced Speech Group.
Robinson and Phil Woodland, a consultant to Spinvox, worked together at Cambridge University on the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK), a way of solving two fundamental problems with speech recognition systems:
1/That they find it hard to recognise continuous speech
2/That they are speaker dependent, working best when trained to recognise the speech characteristics of a particular user.
Daniel Doulton, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Spinvox, says having Tony Robinson working for the business full time will mean it can further speed up its voice to text/email product. “He brings with him further breakthroughs,” said Doulton. “We will improve the system’s ability to self-learn and to ‘ask’ for help with converting certain words to text.”
The company is positioning itself as a wider speech recognition business and is thought to be a possible acquisition target for a larger player. Doulton expects the company to move into new areas of speech recognition, such as replacing some of those automated phone systems by late 2009. You know the ones that tell you to “press 1, if you want to buy a ticket…press 17 (or that's how it feels) if you have lost your baggage”. He says “the technology could be available sooner; it’s a question of getting the distribution arrangements in place.”
The company has recently broadened out from its main product by developing related products, including, most recently, two systems for Vodafone Spain launched in February.
These allow callers to Vodafone customers to press 1 to dictate a text message verbally if the person they are calling is not available and they don’t want to leave a voicemail. Another product allows Vodafone Spain customers to press 115 to dictate a text message verbally – from choice, rather than because the recipient isn’t answering.
The products are not exclusive to Vodafone Spain and Doulton expects Spinvox to sign up several more customers for them later this year.
Spinvox has also added a product that enables people to blog using voice-to-text conversion from a mobile or fixed line, or to update social networking sites like facebook or text-message based Twitter.
Spinvox, the UK business best known for converting mobile voicemail to texts, has hired speech expert Tony Robinson to head up its Advanced Speech Group.
Robinson and Phil Woodland, a consultant to Spinvox, worked together at Cambridge University on the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK), a way of solving two fundamental problems with speech recognition systems:
1/That they find it hard to recognise continuous speech
2/That they are speaker dependent, working best when trained to recognise the speech characteristics of a particular user.
Daniel Doulton, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Spinvox, says having Tony Robinson working for the business full time will mean it can further speed up its voice to text/email product. “He brings with him further breakthroughs,” said Doulton. “We will improve the system’s ability to self-learn and to ‘ask’ for help with converting certain words to text.”
The company is positioning itself as a wider speech recognition business and is thought to be a possible acquisition target for a larger player. Doulton expects the company to move into new areas of speech recognition, such as replacing some of those automated phone systems by late 2009. You know the ones that tell you to “press 1, if you want to buy a ticket…press 17 (or that's how it feels) if you have lost your baggage”. He says “the technology could be available sooner; it’s a question of getting the distribution arrangements in place.”
The company has recently broadened out from its main product by developing related products, including, most recently, two systems for Vodafone Spain launched in February.
These allow callers to Vodafone customers to press 1 to dictate a text message verbally if the person they are calling is not available and they don’t want to leave a voicemail. Another product allows Vodafone Spain customers to press 115 to dictate a text message verbally – from choice, rather than because the recipient isn’t answering.
The products are not exclusive to Vodafone Spain and Doulton expects Spinvox to sign up several more customers for them later this year.
Spinvox has also added a product that enables people to blog using voice-to-text conversion from a mobile or fixed line, or to update social networking sites like facebook or text-message based Twitter.
Labels: Daniel Doulton, mobile, mobile phones, mobiles, SMS, SMSes, Speech Recognition, Spinvox, text messages, Tony Robinson, Vodafone Spain, voicemail
posted by Joia Shillingford at Wednesday, March 12, 2008
1 comments
