I'd imagine James did know exactly how it worked. But why would he let the cat out the bag? In his role for SpinVox he'd be not only under NDA, but I'd imagine have his balls chopped off if he was found to be writing negative things about his (ex-) employer.

As for duping the MIR audience, there's a simple choice: Either clearly write a disclaimer stating your relationship with the company, or don't write the article at all. There's been a few times over the past month or so when someone has asked me if I could write about them for MIR, and I've had to pass it over to Ewan as I feel there's a conflict of interest due to actual or potential commercial relationships I have in place elsewhere.

I guess we all had a hunch about SpinVox and the human element about their transcriptions – but probably gave them the benefit of the doubt and thought it was some sort of magic QA/learning thing. You know, like machine recognised version goes to operator along with original audio, operator listens and corrects words/fills in the blanks.

Dig a bit deeper and there appears to be a third world labour/human rights story brewing here. Mike Butcher at TechCrunch has already uncovered the tip of the iceberg with the discovery of the Facebook groups. Run some of those through Google translate and it's not a pretty picture.

As for competition, I'm giving Vox Sciences a whirl. OK so I've only had a couple of voicemails since this morning when I set it up, but so far it seems to work.

Anyone who's worked in voice/ivr etc knows how hard speech recognition is.. don't they?

Cinema – “Please state the name of your nearest town”
Me – “RICHMOND”
Cinema – “Did you say 'WOLVERHAMPTON/TIMBUKTU”
Me – “TAXI”

Don't think I was ever under any illusion they weren't using farmed transcribers (any different to Apple sweat shops in China?), of course the interesting part is how much of it is actually automated. I bet they got too busy too soon, and have not had time to do anything other than keep majority transcribing. Do wonder where all that funding went mind you.. wow. I believe they have some cool in country on carrier deals in places like Spain.. Maybe that's a bigger play than D2C for them.

One question – where is the competition?! I'd say it'd be very hard to get many carriers to allow further connections of this type..

As to the mix of automatic speech to text via tech vs via human interaction, it would be interesting to know that mix. They say only some go via call centres, I would be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Finally, what difference does it really make from a consumer perspective. I wouldn't use such a service for delicate or highly confidential communication anyway. As to what the investors have got – I would hope they did their due dilligence (and would be very surprised if they had not).

I'd imagine James did know exactly how it worked. But why would he let the cat out the bag? In his role for SpinVox he'd be not only under NDA, but I'd imagine have his balls chopped off if he was found to be writing negative things about his (ex-) employer.

As for duping the MIR audience, there's a simple choice: Either clearly write a disclaimer stating your relationship with the company, or don't write the article at all. There's been a few times over the past month or so when someone has asked me if I could write about them for MIR, and I've had to pass it over to Ewan as I feel there's a conflict of interest due to actual or potential commercial relationships I have in place elsewhere.

I guess we all had a hunch about SpinVox and the human element about their transcriptions – but probably gave them the benefit of the doubt and thought it was some sort of magic QA/learning thing. You know, like machine recognised version goes to operator along with original audio, operator listens and corrects words/fills in the blanks.

Dig a bit deeper and there appears to be a third world labour/human rights story brewing here. Mike Butcher at TechCrunch has already uncovered the tip of the iceberg with the discovery of the Facebook groups. Run some of those through Google translate and it's not a pretty picture.

As for competition, I'm giving Vox Sciences a whirl. OK so I've only had a couple of voicemails since this morning when I set it up, but so far it seems to work.

Anyone who's worked in voice/ivr etc knows how hard speech recognition is.. don't they?

Cinema – “Please state the name of your nearest town”
Me – “RICHMOND”
Cinema – “Did you say 'WOLVERHAMPTON/TIMBUKTU”
Me – “TAXI”

Don't think I was ever under any illusion they weren't using farmed transcribers (any different to Apple sweat shops in China?), of course the interesting part is how much of it is actually automated. I bet they got too busy too soon, and have not had time to do anything other than keep majority transcribing. Do wonder where all that funding went mind you.. wow. I believe they have some cool in country on carrier deals in places like Spain.. Maybe that's a bigger play than D2C for them.

One question – where is the competition?! I'd say it'd be very hard to get many carriers to allow further connections of this type..

As to the mix of automatic speech to text via tech vs via human interaction, it would be interesting to know that mix. They say only some go via call centres, I would be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Finally, what difference does it really make from a consumer perspective. I wouldn't use such a service for delicate or highly confidential communication anyway. As to what the investors have got – I would hope they did their due dilligence (and would be very surprised if they had not).