Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Good stuff going on here.

Keep up the good work Rory. Who said investigative journalism was dead?

Good for Rory. Let's have less of Twitter, more of this.

This is the kind of stuff we want to read, not some rubbish about Twitter changing its homepage. Good work, Rory.

Bravo Rory, good work. Well-thought out and well substantiated - you're quite right to explain your logic.

Rory, this is very interesting. If I was investing in a technology company, big or small, I would want to see a working demo.

Great research, Rory: this is the kind of thing that we need to see. It's content like this that will retain its value even when ordinary news can be found and spread by everyone: detailed research, analysis, informed comment, inferences drawn. Content like this is one reason I am happy to pay my licence fee and why I defend the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ from detractors. Keep up the good work!

No need to apologise Rory, good article but you don't need me to confirm that!

Nice one lad! There are plenty of shysters in business out there. It's up to us to be discerning consumers, and ensure that companies who employ dishonesty as a tactic are run out of town.

I'm interested to hear what people are saying about this on Twitter. Any colour?

+1 For this story. -1 for any more twitter rubbish.

6. At 12:48pm on 29 Jul 2009, Lyndsaygirton wrote:

Rory, this is very interesting. If I was investing in a technology company, big or small, I would want to see a working demo.

If you could get a tech company to demo what you wanted I'd be very interested.
Sales staff are never engineers/programmers and always promise they'll deliver, and very rarely do.

NHS/DWP/Probabtion service IT systems anyone?

Maybe Spinavox too?

Refuting blogged responses to original reports is great.
Keep it up!
Public Relations = organised lying.

Bravo Rory. Will be very interested to see what the information commissioner's office comes up with. Even if Spinvox is found to be complying with the letter of the law it's hardly complying with its spirit - maybe a bit of secondary legislation is needed to close any loopholes.

This comment shouldn't be relied upon as definitive legal opinion, but I believe the Data Protection explanation to be founded on a misunderstanding.

If the data is "COMPLETELY anonymised" [their capitals!], it's useless because the transcribed result can't be matched up when it comes back. There must be some sort of message-ID in it. Personal data are data "which relate to a living individual who can be identified from those data and other information which is in the possession of, or is likely to come into the possession of, the data controller" (see S.1(1) of the Act). So an anonymised message which contains an identifier to link it back to explicit personal data counts as personal data.

This personal data is transferred to the data processor, who is explicitly defined in S.70 of the Act as a recipient. If the recipient is outside the EEA, transfers outside the EEA should feature in the Register entry.

Note that the explicit personal data to which the anonymised message is linked doesn't have to go anywhere, just be in the possession of the controller. It's the link which means the anonymised message is still personal data. And that's quite apart from what actually seems to be happening with the explicit data.

I look forward to what the Information Commissioner has to say.

And I echo other comments: this sort of thing -- stuff which can't become news yet -- is just what a blog is for. Carry on!

Don't apologise for a long post, especially when it is so well written and detailed.
Personally I believe that this is just one example of where people don't like to have their information used/distributed without consent. Perhaps a good anecdote for the bigger picture.
I fully agree with all the previous posts about making a change from a particular social networking site that has been covered extensively in other blogs.

They really are something, aren't they? All spin, no substance. I guess lying and fraud runs in the family.

Excellent journalism - Spinvox have some issues, for sure.

I have just read the patent application for the original service that has just been posted on your tech news site. How can this patent possibly have been granted???

I get a voice message. I type it. I send it as a txt message. Doh.

How is this different from my soon to be applied for patent for toast (since apparently you can 'patent' any old fool nonsense)... I take bread. I heat it over a flame. It turns into toast. Patent please.

Interestingly, I attended an interview just over two years ago for a contract programming position at Spinvox, which I subsequently declined.

I signed a non-disclosure agreement as part of that interview, but since it's now become public knowledge, I can confirm that the application that I was being interviewed to work on was the call centre part of the app & was described to me at the time as only passing the snippets of the conversation that the main speech-to-text engine was unable to convert.

The App was only in the early stages when I was interviewed & I obviously don't know how it was finally implemented - but I can confirm that the initial design at least agreed with what Spinvox are saying it does now.

From Peru...there are 2 centers for SpinVox here, Spanish and English, hired by their broker, Flat World Solutions, all messages are transcribed entirely by humans, I have been a transcriber and used their tensing program and all...no machine is working on that, we even have trainers and supervisors that came from UK to train us in typing and other things

Rory you are totally correct, below is a section from one of Spinvox's own patent applications (Publication Number: US 2008/0049908 A1) - which can be found freely on www.google.com/patents - basically what this says is that even Spinvox admits admits that a fully automated system is almost impossible.

[0321] 1. Given the large vocabulary and the varying audio quality, it seems impossible to achieve high enough speech recognition accuracy for fully automatic conversion for more than a tiny fraction of utterances. Reliably detecting this fraction, i.e. deciding that no human check is needed is a very interesting longer-term research problem but probably not a realistic option in the short term.

I have nothing for or against Spinvox. As a complete bystander, it seems to me that Spinvox is being crucified for simply protecting its business interests by not revealing all its information.

On the question of EU data protection laws, the company claims to have looked into the matter and has given a technical reason as to why it is, in fact, compliant. Rory then responds by saying that he's no expert, but he doesn't think they've wriggled out of it. Perhaps it might be fairer on Spinvox if he made the effort to find an expert, and see what they make of Spinvox's defence.

On the matter of the patents, it might really help Rory to defend his story if he made an effort to understand how the patenting process actually operates. For example, the patent that he cites as having been "filed" (sic) in 2009 was actually lodged in 2003. Spinvox's defence that they have lodged a wide range of patents, and that they don't necessarily use them all in their products or services, seems entirely and utterly reasonable.

Why is Spinvox being villified ? Is this a case of a reporter not understanding the complexities of the story, and getting it utterly wrong ? Or is this one of those "nudge-nudge" stories where there's actually incontroverible proof of misdemeanour that can't actually be published, so you have to make a fuss about the stuff around the edges ?

Either way, it's not very seemly. Until we get a more rational and informed critique of Spinvox's behaviour, I'm punting for Spinvox to win the argument.

@ unbrokenman (#22): Spinvox aren't being vilified, they say that their business works in one way but it seems that in actuality that it isn't and they're being pressed on that fact. It's rather disingenuous that they say that a computer system does all (or most) of the work if the reality is that it's mainly down to an actual person.

I think the most telling argument is James Whatley's response to question 4. I understand the need for businesses to keep certain information confidential, but I'd like to know how letting us know the number (or percentage) of calls transferred to human operators is "business critical". Coca-Cola publishing their recipe is one thing as that is the basis for their entire company but a simple number from Spinvox wouldn't bring the company down, it's not like people are asking to see the source code to their software.

When I read that not all of the message was translated by one person on the main Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ report, I started to think of Monty Python and the funniest joke in the world, which was used during the war to kill Germans, they had the translators only translate parts of the joke because if they read it all they'd die...

unbrokenman

Read the story at this link, and see if you still feel positive about Spinvox:

Hi,

I could have told you this 2 years ago. I hired a UK recruiter who recruited (among others in his company) for Spinvox as the primary recruitment supplier. They were tasked with recruiting most of the staff at Spinvox through their period of growth. The recruiter explained that they'd won numerous awards based on thier text-speech system, which were in fact humans doing the work - all the guys at the recruitment firm knew this - but didn't say anything as it was good business for them.

There was talk of them opening up shop here in Australia - and the guy I hired contacted Spinvox regarding this - again we discussed the human-to-text 'scam'. I never thought of it hitting the news 2 years later. At the time I thought it was clever marketing + utilising the growing use of humans rather than computerss - Amazon's TURK is a good example of this in effect.

Good work Rory. I think there is another angle to this story that merits some further discussion. According to the press this company has taken $100M in funding with a major contribution from at least one investment bank that received government assistance following the recent finacial meltdown. I would think that the only reason to make an investment as big as that in a company like this would be the technology and yet your story suggests that that technology is not at all what it was presented to be. Clearly a service like this will have scalability issues as long as humans are a component of it. Given that it would seem that an awful lot of money has been pumped into what is beginning to look like a lot of PR and not a lot else it looks like the investors either got the wool puled over their eyes or made a bad investment decision. Loop that back to the recent financial crisis and one might feel that there are also some tough questions to be asked to those pumping money into this company...

I am not sure how my last post broke the rules but I will try again. The issue with Spinvox is that many millions of Β£s have been invested by people who thought they were buying revolutionary technology. These people were not stupid, they looked at large telecoms who apparently had carried out due diligence and then signed contracts with Spinvox. Funds should have been invested in development of the new technology, instead it has been used to pay for massive call-centers. With the money spent, the investors do not have a share in any intellectual property, nor anything else - the money has gone and there is nothing to show for it. There is a word for this behaviour, that if I use, will apparently warrant my post being rejected - any guesses what that word is?

@VCAnalyst
You have indeed brought up a very valid issue here. This may not in context of this particular issue but it would be interesting to explore that whether there are other such start up companies which were funded and have lost millions of dollars.

Now THIS is a blog post! Well done Rory.

Did you ever get to go on your guided tour of the Spinvox head-office?

"[JW] I'm not kidding when I say that it would be the equivalent of Coca-Cola publishing their exact recipe up on their own blog.

RC-J: So they're still not answering that question - nor are they refuting the main charge in my story."

Oh, but they have answered that question, at least inadvertantly. The only possible answer that would be the equivalent of Coca-Cola publishing their recipe is "All of them" - it's the only answer to that question that would reveal anything of the technical nature of their business.

If the answer were, say, 10% or even 50% it would be the equivalent to Coca-Cola answering a question about their drink's flavour with "We put things in it." It might cause the reader to marvel at their ability to achieve so much without human involvement, but it would give absolutely no leverage to any competitor wanting to replicate their formula.

See for links to more articles and commentary around this breaking story.

RC-J: So they're still not answering that question

Hah, the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ do that frequently! Pot, Kettle, Black.

However, this is very interesting territory, and more blogging of this type is appreciated.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

Interesting story and analysis. Makes me wonder how Apple does visual voicemail on the iphone...is it a white label version of spinvox?

How have spinvox raised so much VC money? Are they in cohoots with governments to provide them with this kind of data? The connection with Pakistan is certainly interesting.

When is the lady who started the company going to speak?

When is the lady who started the company going to speak?

Next Tuesday, August 4th, apparently.

Twitter traffic suggets Spinvox has invited a number of "bloggers" to its Marlow HQ that day.

Whether the author of the article above is one of them, we don't know.

More on Spinvox breaking radio silence next week..this looks like the company's invitation...

How Does SpinVox Convert Voice to Text?

I know you are interested in finding out more about how the SpinVox Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS) converts millions of voice messages to text, so I am pleased to invite you to our Marlow Headquarters for a technical briefing where you will see the VMCS in action and get to try it for yourself.

Youll get the chance to speak a number of your own messages to see how they go through the automation system. Youll see how, as the messages get increasingly complex, the system might refer them to a Quality Control (QC) agent for checking or completion to ensure that they meet our quality standards.

During the demo you can get hands-on, acting as a QC agent, so that you can see both sides of the process. You will get first-hand experience of how the application works and how quickly the messages go through.

This is the first time that SpinVox has offered demonstrations of its VMCS and we hope youll take the time to come and see it. Well be running the introduction to VMCS and the demos on Tuesday 04 August, from 10.00-11.00am and from 11.30-12.30pm. In addition to the demonstration, there will, of course, be an opportunity to ask questions.


The above courtesy of TechCrunch (below) which also suggests Rory Cellan Jones won't be there, beacause he's on holiday!

An exceptionally good piece of journalism. Twitter wasn't even mentioned, I'm impressed!

I'm sure Spinvox are complying to the law to the letter, but they certainly aren't doing so morally. To me the message is just as personal as the phone number etc. What on earth makes them think that it is any different?

If anyone questions the validity of this story, TechCrunch have written an article following the Spinvox demo:



Especially interesting is part where Milo sends in his own message.

_Ewan_ wrote:

Good for Rory. Let's have less of Twitter, more of this.

I agree with _Ewan_, we can't view Twitter during work hours, so the only access we get is through the Blogs here and HYS

It is totally true and also there are people doing the voice-to-text conversion in Latin America.
I have seen this software and all that it can do is to predict the text messages (from a database). After that, a person edits the text or sometimes listen to it all and then starts to transcribe.
I dont know if its ilegal but at least these companies (like Vodafone) should tell the true to their customers.

Rory:

I am glad, that you and the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ are standing by the story on
SPINVOX....

Thanks,
Dennis Junior

Interesting story and analysis. Makes me wonder how Apple does visual voicemail on the iphone...is it a white label version of spinvox?
. How have spinvox raised so much VC money? Are they in cohoots with governments to provide them with this kind of data? The connection with Pakistan is certainly interesting.