Anyway, I think there’d be second-order effects to detect.

If it’s all humans, I’ll expect 100% ‘HARE’. A machine will doubtless flip to ‘HAIR’ a few times – since it’s a far more common spelling of the same phonetics.

All good honest fun. More interesting is the mystique they felt they needed to conjure up.

Of course, people may not be happy sending you their voicemails for reasons of privacy so this approach to sample collection might not work

SpinVox claims “over 30 million live users” and “we now need fewer than 100 agents per 1m”. These claims are hard to evaluate, if we don’t know the definition of users.

Are these unique users? Are they “active” users, and by what definition, or is a cumulative number since the launch of the VMCS database a few years ago? Does 30 million number count only persons recording a message (the relevant number for discussing SpinVox ASR technology) or count only the mailbox owners who are the customer of the mobile operator (the relevant number for discussing SpinVox business model), or both?

Milo, if you understand the answer to these questions, I’d appreciate your writing about it. If you don’t know the answer, I’d appreciate your asking SpinVox on Tuesday.

Thank you.

http://www.spinvox.com/assets/en-gb/images/Leadership_Counts_White_Paper.pdf

Examples:
>> SpinVox Blog: “over 30 million live users and will service over 100 million by the end of 2009” http://blog.spinvox.com/category/spinvox/
>> Christina Domecq: “where we used to need 5,000 agents for the first 1m customers, we now need fewer than 100 agents per 1m” http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article6735993.ece

These claims are meaningless and possibly deceptive if nobody outside of SpinVox knows how it defines these terms. On Tuesday, they should be asked to explain clearly, consistently and unambiguously how they define these terms, and any other terms that they use in fact claims.

Question 1. Who is defined as a USER? Does SpinVox count one messages as having 1 user (the message creator OR the mailbox customer) or double-count as 2 users (the message creator AND the mailbox customer)? Logically, from a from an ASR technology perspective, isn’t a USER legitimately only defined as the person who’s voice was recorded? But from a business model perspective, isn’t it only revenue generating CUSTOMERS that matter? Which is it?

Question 2. What is the meaning of LIVE user? That’s strange word to choose; why not use the more familiar and plain meaning term “active” user? I can understand how “live” can apply to the message recipient who have the service activated on their mailbox, but what does it mean to be a LIVE user, if by user you sometimes mean any person who ever spoke a message converted by SpinVox? (Years after the message was recorded, how do you know if they are still live or dead ).
SpinVox seems to be very loose with the verb tense when talking about whether the 30 million number refers to CURRENT active users or the CUMULATIVE sum of users since the launch of its VMCS. For example, on page 5 of its new White Paper, it claims that is “has” over 30 million users, but on the previous page, it claims “over 30 million users activated from launch.” Which is it?

Question 3: If you are counting the message creators as “users”, are these UNIQUE users? Or does a person get counted as a new person every time that they record a message converted by SpinVox. It is a bit spooky to think that SpinVox claims there might be dozens of users still LIVE in my SpinVox mailbox, including that awful robocall from Sarah Palin from October, and that potty-mouthed obscene caller who left me a message three years ago.

We need a clear and consistent definition of “user” so that we are sure that SpinVox is not comparing APPLES to ORANGES when for instance it claims “we used to need 5,000 agents for the first 1m customers, we now need fewer than 100 agents per 1m”.

APPLES scenario (5000 agents per 1m active users?): The TimesOnline article cited above reports that SpinVox has some 15,000 UK users that get the service directly from SpinVox, not through a carrier. One can guess that these users are pretty highly motivated to sign up in this way and that they might be relatively high users/communicators. Therefore, when Domecq claims an old agent:user ratio of 5000:1m, is she referring to this relatively small pool of UK mailbox owners?

ORANGES scenario (<100 agents per 1m potential customers): Compare this group of “users” to the way that SpinVox defines customers in the carrier context: “19th August 2007 – Alltel: 12m Customers Get SpinVox” http://www.spinvox.com/announcements.html?wp_month=8&wp_year=2007&wp_day=false&wp_start=0 In this case, the company defines “customer” as anyone who could be offered the service by their carrier. If customer is defined as the entire customer base of a carrier, and only a small minority end up actually using the service on a permanent basis, then it is not surprising that SpinVox would only need “fewer than 100 agents per 1m” even if the service involved only low levels of automation.

30m – 100m are those all “active” users? Are they paying? Even at a few cents per message their revenues should be higher than reported.

if somebody could get hold of a tenzing manual to wave at them during the meeting that would be legendary stuff. be interesting to see how they react to that

“This is a message for David Hare – that’s H, A, R, E”

Expect the surname to come back perfectly spelled, but without the word ‘that’s’ or the letters.

In other words, a simple ‘Turing Test’ is to tempt a human into processing the semantics of metadata in your message. A computer is more likely to transcribe the syntax literally.

Once managed to get a smiley inserted in the message by asking nicely.

Also ask them why they are so ashamed of the human-based process in the first place.

2. Everything they tell you they will have spent the last week carefully crafting.

3. Every number and figure they give you will be based on a context that only they are aware of and in most cases don’t want you to be.

4. Every person you meet will be hand picked by the senior management team, and they will all be briefed on what they can/cannot say.

5. More than likely they will make you sign an NDA, and they will want to vet whatever you publish.

What if you want the message translated- for instance from english to spanish- that would be cool and similar to one feature in Google Wave?

Regards

Tor

What if you want the message translated- for instance from english to spanish- that would be cool and similar to on feature in Google Wave?

Regards

Tor

It specifically refer to the human transcribers.

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220060223502%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20060223502&RS=DN/20060223502

Method of providing voicemails to a wireless information device

Abstract

Voicemail is received at a voicemail server and converted to an audio file format; it is then sent or streamed over a wide area network to a voice to text transcription system comprising a network of computers. One of the networked computers plays back the voice message to an operator and the operator intelligently transcribes the actual message from the original voice message by entering the corresponding text message (actually a succinct version of the original voice message, not a verbose word-for-word conversion) into the computer to generate a transcribed text message. The transcribed text message is then sent to the wireless information device from the computer. Because human operators are used instead of machine transcription, voicemails are converted accurately, intelligently, appropriately and succinctly into text messages (SMS/MMS).

IMHO this is either a function of offshoring their call centres and transcribers with English as second language… its either that or the “brain” is doing more of the conversions. either way it isn’t good.

i would be interested to know how they measure accuracy of these conversions. i for 1 have been getting frustrated but still not complained. eventually i will just cancel my subscription. i will certainly do so if google voice’s service is equivalent. (speaking of which- how are are they going to justify charging consumers if Google do it for free?)

perhaps worth asking them what proportion of messages customers call in to listen to. if their conversion quality is very good that should be a very small number.

First qustion is how many centers they are using around the world and how many people are employed there. From the number of employees you can understand how many messages are being transcribed manually.

I suggest for a meeting to ask them about the differentiation between them and jott and google voice. I suggest to provide the system with a data in a different language and high accent. The problem with automatic system is that if they are ok at 99% still you will have enough customers not happy from lousy transcription so for quality purposes you must review all the messages and thus have privacy issues.