Does SpinVox use computers or people to translate messages?
SpinVox is a company which specializes in converting voice messages in to text messages. However, while the company claims most of the conversions are handled by computers running its patented Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS), it seems that humans may be more involved than first thought.
SpimVox was founded in 2004 Christina Domecq and Daniel Doulton and has since raised more than $200 million from investors. The services SpinVox operate are based on converting voice messages in to text and are being used in countries around the world including the U.K., the U.S., Australia, and South Africa.
It’s assumed by most people, and the company also pushes this fact, that the vast majority of the conversions are done by voice recognition software running on computers. But the BBC is now claiming that this isn’t necessarily the case, and that human workers actually do a great deal of the conversions.
Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones claims that sources insist most messages are read and converted into text by workers in call centers located in South Africa and the Philippines. The BBC quote former SpinVox call center worker Kareem Lucilius as saying:
It was done 100 percent by people. We heard the message from the very beginning to the very end. Love messages, secret messages, messages with sexual content, even people threatening to kill each other.
If these claims are true then it raises serious questions over SpinVox’s data protection policy because transferring personal data outside the European Economic Area is against UK Data Protection Register policy.
SpinVox has, predictably, answered the accusations. In a blog post, the company counters Cellan-Jones’s claims and insists that it “has successfully managed millions of conversions, and has no history of breach of security,” and “is fully compliant with the Data Protection Act 1998.”
As Jack Schofield of The Guardian points out, it was maybe a little naive to think these services were ever going to be handled purely by computers because even the best voice recognition software has serious problems converting some words and phrases.
So it then becomes a case of whether each individual user of the service is happy to accept the fact that their messages could end up being transcribed by a call center worker in South Africa or the Philippines. It personally wouldn’t bother me but then most of my messages are about nothing much anyway. Other people may think differently.
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July 26th, 2009
don’t be fooled! spinvox voice to text is 100% human transcription and done by call center agents who laughs at Americans for their lapse in grammar.