Review: Spinvox Lets Me Read My Voicemail

March 29th, 2009 • Mark Guim • Filed Under •

I’ve been trying out the Spinvox voicemail service for a couple of weeks now and I think it’s pretty cool. The way it’s supposed to work is you receive an SMS text and/or email transcribed from a voicemail. It’s not necessary, 100% accurate, nor safe from spam, but it’s really handy.

5800 Spinvox
Spinvox voicemail to email as seen on Nokia 5800

Sample Usage

Sheila was not busy at work, so she called asking if I can bring her the Rick Steve’s Italy guide for our backpacking trip later this summer. I told her I would right after I showered. A few minutes later, she realized she had homework, so she called again to bring her textbook instead. It went to voicemail since I was in the shower and couldn’t reach the Nokia 5800 on my desk. When I returned to my desk, I noticed a missed call and an email notification on the 5800. The email said:

“Hey babe, it’s me. I looked up my homework online so you don’t need me to bring reektis(?) but if you have time you don’t have to ___ can you bring me the Most Steep(?) Pathology Book the one that you gave me. That’s the one I need under the computer but you don’t have to bring it if you don’t. Ok. Bye.”

- spoken through SpinVox

Spinvox puts a question next to words it couldn’t transcribe. This usually happens to uncommon names. The word reektis(?) should have been “Rick Steve,” while Most Steep(?) was supposed to be Mosby. Pretty close, huh?

The Good

Thanks to Spinvox, I didn’t have to pick up the phone and dial to listen for my voicemail. It was already available in an email on my phone, and even the computer. This specially comes in handy if you have several new messages. By default, you receive the voicemail as text messages as well, but I turned that off since I already use push-email notifications.

Another good reason for this service, is that you’ll have a record of your voicemails. As long as you don’t delete the email, you can always go back to it and even search for it.

The Bad

Spinvox isn’t perfect. Some of my voicemails can’t be transcribed and instead I get a message telling me to call and listen.

+44———: Just left you a voice message that you need to listen to

Another issue worth mentioning is I get about one spam message per day from people who haven’t called me. I asked Spinvox about this and they said it is caused by auto-dialing systems that are annoyingly popular in the US. They can change the voicemail number but it doesn’t guarantee stopping the spammers.

Final Thoughts

Spinvox Voicemail is not for everyone, but it is very handy. To sum it up, Spinvox makes voicemail more accessible.

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  • Interesting post. I have stumbled this for my friends. Hope others find it as interesting as I did.
  • This is a good find. How about the cost? Is it pocket friendly?
  • Hey great review, I really enjoyed the read.
  • BBalea
    As a realtor i use Voicemailtel.com services, for a business is just perfect.
  • Jeff
    yep, mostly humans. Here's the only photo I could find of spinvox agents transcribing messages in a call center.

    http://voicemailtranscription.blogspot.com/2008...
  • Malcolm Waldon
    hmmm ... spinvox isn' atually driven by technology but instead the messages are transcribed by hundreds of agents in places like manilla and johannesburg. that's dandy of course, unles u r concerned about personal details being listened too and transcribed b a perfect stranger who works in a place not exactly known for its low crime rate!
  • Really? Humans do the transcriptions for spinvox?
  • Hey Mark,

    That's simply not true and a complete and utter fabrication.

    SpinVox does employ human agents to assist the main system when it *doesn't* know a word or sound. These are illustrated in your messages by underscores and/or questions marks like so:

    ___ or (?)

    When this happens, the sound itself is cut *out* of the message, detached from any numbers and/or recognisable features and then put into a queue.
    Further down the line (normally within a couple of weeks), these words/sounds are then listened to and converted manually into the system so as to not get it wrong in the future.

    When required (then and only then), this is done post-event and never, ever 'in-situ'

    I hope this clarifies things for you,

    Cheers,

    James

    PS We get these accusations from either disgruntled ex-employees and/or bitter rivals from time to time. Take it as a compliment as they only ever seem to appear on the more popular blog posts about the SpinVox service.

    ;)
  • Humans, when presented with a single word or sound from an audio stream, have no context. When this happens, they actually perform very badly, almost as badly as computers, at discerning the correct word being uttered. If we take out our pattern recognition books, our AI books, and most importantly, our speech processing and speech recognition books, we'll find that one of the key aspects to automated speech recognition, when you strip away all the mathematics and exotic terminology, is context.

    For example, knowing that "I'd like a nice cup of " preceded the word I'm trying to process now, helps my algorithm determine that there's a higher probability of the word being "tea" (if it's a short, one-syllable word with certain phonemes in it), or "coffee" (if it's a disyllabic word....) - anyway - you get the idea.

    We humans do the same thing. If you fire a word at me, chopped out of an audio stream, it's often very difficult to determine what that word is. "Tea" is a good example: depending on the audio environment, quality of the line etc., "tea" can sound like "tea" (correct), "tee" (different spelling - context - meet you at the first tee), "me", "be" and so on.

    So,

    - if I were running a service that offered voice-to-text as part of the solution (and I do - I work for Dial2Do)
    - and I wanted to ensure good overall transcription quality (and I do)
    - then - when I offer audio to humans to be corrected, it behoves me to offer the whole stream, because that way, they have the whole context, and therefore the best chance of transcribing correctly

    Even if you aren't a speech recognition nerd, common sense tells us this is so.

    As a result, I don't believe SpinVox do it this way. I think they offer the wider audio message to help the tranbscribers do their job. It. Just. Makes. Sense.

    I also don't think there's anything wrong with that (Nuance, Dial2Do, PhoneTag and others all do likewise).

    And lastly - I still have severe envy for the SpinVox Stand at CTIA and MWC. Awesome! :-)

    Cheers, Sean
  • Jeff
    There's also apparently some unpaid spinvox humans with a grudge ....

    http://twitpic.com/2am96
  • but a nice voice guide
  • I've been using it as well, and I like it. Though I get delays in messages coming to me from time to time (network issue). Will get my writeup done in the coming days, this service is defintiely something that many businesses should use.
  • i'm now trying out Google Voice. I don't think it's supposed to be set up this way but it's possible. I'll report back what I think of it in a week.
  • Now that I am looking forward to :)
  • So far, it's not as accurate as spinvox. Will need to hear more voicemails though for more comparison.
  • jon
    this would be great if/when it arrives in Australia! :) funny they have an office here but no service!
    and so we wane...
  • Hi Jon,

    SpinVox is currently rolling out on the Telstra network in Australia.
    Hope that is of use to you!

    Cheers,

    James
  • I'd like to give Spinvox a trial Mark, see how it functions for myself, thanks for that :)
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