SpinVox Responds to Criticism of Voice to Text Service

Voice to text translation service, SpinVox has found itself in the middle of a media controversy after an article on the BBC website pointed out that the company uses call centers to transcribe some messages instead of automated machines.

SpinVox has hit back and said that the original BBC article contained "a number of allegations over its privacy standards, technology, evidence offered by a Facebook group and finances which SpinVox believes are both incorrect and inaccurate."

SpinVox commercial client base is international, predominantly in Latin America, Asia Pacific, North America and southern Europe. It has no network operator services in the UK but offers free trial accounts such as the one used by the BBC journalist, Rory Cellan-Jones.

The key allegation is that SpinVox relies on call centers in a type of "Mechanical Turk" system to transcribe messages - and while SpinVox accepts that it does use them, it insists that the bulk of messages are transcribed automatically by machine. Only those messages its machines are unable to mange are passed to a call center to deal with, and the machine algorithm then updated with the transcription.

At the moment, SpinVox says that it requires only a few hundred agents per market as its system is capable of automatically converting all standard messages without learning assistance.

Although the UK based company does not have an operator contract within the UK, it does offer a free service. The UK's Information Commissioner, who oversees data protection issues said that: "The Data Protection Act does not prevent Spinvox from using people, rather than machines, to translate audio messages into text. However, it may be helpful if the company is clearer about the likelihood that people will be used to translate messages. This is particularly important if customers are using the service for transmitting sensitive or secure information. We will be contacting the company to ensure that its entry on the data protection register is both accurate and complete, especially with regards to the transfer of personal data outside the European Economic Area."

On the web: BBC dot.life - SpinVox

Posted to the site on 23rd July 2009