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back to article SpinVox offers pounds of own flesh to staff

Voicemail transcription service SpinVox is offering staff share options over the summer instead of boring old wages - though the company is keen to emphasise this is about shared ownership rather than running out of money. The offer came in a mail sent out to employees and is cited as a reaction to the credit crunch. No one is …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    reminds me of 2000

    remember reading in newspaper when I was in silicon valley towards end of the 2000 bubble of employees of a start-up who'd been hired by a startup on impressively large salaries but where they all had to agree to only receive something like 25% of their salaries with the rest being banked as IOUs that would be paid once the company floated ... however, before this happened the company folded leaving several engineers whingeing to the papers on how they'd worked all hours for 2 years being paid peanuts and the fortune they were waiting to receive had disappeared.

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  2. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Too little, too late

    It sounds like a nice idea - having your voice mail transcribed into words and then emailed / SMS'd to you. Although since this is a major feature of Google-Voice, it's hard to see how this little company can compete. Even though they got there first.

    They just don't have the size and coverage that a well-known name like Google has. No matter how good their tech is, when a multi-billion dollar monster elbows into your market place (one you thought you had to yourself - or at least were the leader in) and plonks itself down, right on your favourite spot, it's hard to see if there's any future.

    If I was the major VC shareholder, I'd be looking to do one of two things: go over my patents veeeeeery thoughourly to check if there is any hope of a nice big payoff from an infringement suit, or to sell it off quickly for whatever I could get - not much in this day and age.

    I did even look at their products a while back and tried out their free trial. It seemed to work nicely. But as a company they did seem to hide their achievements rather than exploiting the window of opportunity that their (at the time) unique product had, for all it was worth. Still isn't that what the brits do best?

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    Vox Populus

    Who needs SpinVox when I use the much better http://www.voxsciences.co.uk (or Voxxi as I've taken to call it.)

    A friend of mine did the sexy female voice they use.

    I've never had a problem with it and it's cheap as chips. (chips are about 80p a bag these days aren't they?)

    A pint... because the owner will owe me one for this cheeky advert :-)

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  4. Andrew Jones 1
    Go

    Spinvox

    I love it, transcription is near flawless, has trouble sometimes with a bad connection+fast talker, but 99.9% is good enough for me :-)

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  5. Alain Moran
    Thumb Up

    Spinvox is excellent

    We use spinvox for converting our incoming voicemail to JIRA issues so that everybody in the company (that have the right permissions) can view the call & the right can person respond to the message.

    We have found that while it doesnt translate 100% of the calls the success rate is excellent and we find it very useful, since it prevents useful voicemails getting lost in and amongst the morass of marketing calls we get - marketing calls can be easily spotted in seconds & deleted immediatley, real messages can then be assigned to the member of staff who needs to deal with the call.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Not surprised

    I tried to sign up to their service a couple of times a few months back. Their test line seems really great but you have (or had) to request their prices via phone, then wait for them to email you. Bizzare for a voice/text based company. Also £3 for 10 voicemails, WTF? In the end it was all just too much aggro and expense, even though the concept is very sound. I mean, I get 10+ voicemails a day and must be their target market. For £100+ a month I'll listen to them myself thank you.

    The bigger question is how the hell do you burn through $100m in a year providing a voicemail service? Surely an Asterisk box and a couple of good developers could put together something similar?

    Fail, but I'm sure someone with a bit more clue could make this a real business.

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  7. F1reman

    Darthree

    Don't SpinVox have a deal with the 'Three' network?

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Machine- or Human- translated?

    Can one of you journos ask them what percentage of words are transcribed by machine and what by humans? I heard a rumour from some senior tech suits that it was almost all done by people in India. Be nice if they admitted it, if so.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    <waves>

    Count me in as a (totally independent, honest) "swears by". <crosses fingers>

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  10. Pie Eater
    Paris Hilton

    Try this one on Spinvox

    One One was a racehorse

    One Two was one too

    One One won one race

    One Two won one too.

    No way could a machine get it right!

    Paris, because she'd be hopelessly confused by it too

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  11. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    SpinVox rocks

    Wondering what SpinVox has been doing with its money? Rolling out the service around the world, that's what - 28 carrier deals in total offering the service in Australia, Canada, Spain, South Africa, the US and now 13 countries in Latin America. 30 million plus users already and growing fast and the heavy lifting in the conversion is done by machine which learns by asking a human operator when it doesn't recognise a word. Guess what too in Spain and Latin America it's free! Nice of Google to validate voice to text in the market but the quality of its conversion can't touch SpinVox.

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  12. Sticky
    Go

    SpinVox rocks and rollsout...

    Wondering what SpinVox has been doing with its money? Rolling out the service around the world, that's what - 28 carrier deals in total offering the service in Australia, Canada, Spain, South Africa, the US and now 13 countries in Latin America. 30 million plus users already and growing fast and the heavy lifting in the conversion is done by machine which learns by asking a human operator when it doesn't recognise a word. Guess what too in Spain and Latin America it's free! Nice of Google Voice to validate the voice to text in the market but the quality of its conversion can't touch SpinVox.

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  13. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Just wanted to say...

    ... how excellent Andrew Orlowski's article on SpinVox today was.

    (それオルロフスキについてのコメントを禁止されています)

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