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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I’ve been a big fan of Spinvox since its launch and have been using since then so that must be a couple of years or more now. Sometimes it takes a few minutes for the text message to arrive but overall, I’m really pleased with the service. And it’s only my mumbling friends messages that are difficult to convert but then they’re also quite difficult to listen to!
A few of my friends and colleagues are not so keen on leaving a message, they find the prospect of getting their message into 160 characters a bit daunting. But they do get over it.
The SpinVox offering is really interesting though I am a little surprised about the cost to consumers, considering that we pay 10c in the US per SMS (without an “all you can eat” SMS plan) the model that SpinVox has offered (44c) for receiving a SMS is way out of budget for most consumers. Enterprise users in the US would also think hard before signing on with this service given the widespread adoption of EVDO, Edge and other 3G technologies within the enterprise.
The concept however rocks!
Hi Russel, I am a regular reader here, but this my first comment (you might remember meeting me with your Red Door colleague in London early lasy year re corporate blogging etc!)
Like Helen, I am a BIG fan of Spinvox and have been using it loyally since they launched in UK. But I also agree with Kiran that the retail service is priced out of reach for most consumers. But crucially, there are some key points from your review that are missing that I personally think really makes Spinvox special. (I am a real fan of Spinvox like I say - and know Phil Marnick quite well also - as he used to be a colleague of mine!)
1) The text messages that are sent to your phone from Spinvox, wherever possible, are actually sent *from* the CLI of the caller who leaves the message. This means that they match with the phonebook entries - which means that they can be replied to instantly as if they had actually been texted. This is the single most valuable feature from my perspective. It makes the converted messages much more “personal” than traditional voicemail or conversion propositions that I have seen before.
2) The prepaid top-up billing model (by reverse SMS, or MT billing) as an alternative to credit-card billing is a masterstroke from Spinvox - as it means that corporate users (i.e. users who don’t pay their own bills) can sign up to Spinvox without going through the corporate telecom buyer (just like bypassing the IT department!) which means that you can try out the service straight away without hindrance. Read low barrier to entry. And once you’re on - you’re hooked and (because of point 1 above) you’ll never go back!
I did a mini-review of Spinvox on my journal in January. You can read it at: http://route79.org/journal/?p=80
Best regards - Jag
Thanks for the comments everyone.
Jag, how could I forget Mr Route 79 himself? Nice to hear from you.
Russell