I caught up with SpinVox at CTIA, who offer a voice-to-text messaging service, which I thought was pretty groovy.
The idea is that you get through to someone’s voice mail and leave a message, as normal. Their voice recognition system then converts it into text and sends it as an sms. You don’t have to speak especially clearly or slowly – actually, the person leaving the message doesn’t know about the text angle until the end of the call, when an announcement is made, which acts as a viral plug for SpinVox.
As it happens, I experienced it myself before the meeting, when I left a message for SpinVox’s PR person. When I met up later on, they were able to show me the converted message. They missed only one word in about 50 or so (which gets displayed as xxxxx) but otherwise the message was perfect.
SpinVox has so far recruited 65,000 users in the UK, which is pretty good without an operator deal in place. Each message costs the receiver 25p ($0.44) or a little lower for high volumes, which is a little more expensive than conventional voice mail but seems reasonable, especially as I assume that many customers will be corporate. It’s free for the person leaving the message.
The benefit of such a system is that you can discretely check your incoming sms in many situations where making a call would be unacceptable – like when you’re in a meeting. Plus, you don’t have to scrabble around trying to write phone numbers or other stuff down – it’s already there and stored on your phone. In fact, the vast majority of phones will let you click on the number in an sms to call it or send a message.
SpinVox’s next step is to start working with operators to really scale their product and I think it would make a fine addition to the Enterprise product range. An alternative strategy would be a more efficient marketing channel, as an operator deal is going to hurt margins.
I also think that they should consider expanding the model into another product line where the sender pays to have their voice message to someone of their choice in sms format. Called something like Big Thumb, for the congenitally clumsy or for the over 30′s (present company excepted) it would be a very easy way of sending an sms, without investing too much time in the process.
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