Spinvox converts voice to text and has raised a rumoured £25million so far and employs 130 people. It is based in Marlow and has already generated sales of £2million. But the service is slow. You speak into a mobile phone and wait for a few minutes (let us be generous) and back comes your text or off to your blog or wherever you sent it. I could just about recognise my message so there is work to be done on the speech recognition. However as the volume of messages climbs to monthly figures of millions and tens of millions, Spinvox has turned to Tony Robinson and the Cambridge Cluster to accelerate and accelerate the software. Tony is building a team of ten people but experts in this field are few and far between, even in the Cambridge Cluster. I hope Tony receive some good options to make this product scaleable!
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at 5:54 am - 23rd March 2008 Permalink
Philip
Thanks for the mention. In fact with the announcement in the last week of our latest funding round SpinVox has raised a total of over $200 million.
The latest round of $100 million includes investments from GLG Partners; Goldman Sachs; BlueMountain and Toscafund Asset Management and builds on previous investments made in the company by private equity investors such as Martin Hughes, Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse and Peter Wood, the founder of Direct Line, eSure and Sheila’s Wheels and institutional investors such as ABN Amro, Gartmore and Allen & Co.
The company also currently employs over 300 people, operates on four continents and has signed deals with 12 carrier networks and intends to double that number during the next year.
In order to build the Advanced Speech Group in Cambridge SpinVox will relocate some of its existing team of Automated Speech Recognition experts from its world headquarters in Marlow, Bucks as well as hiring locally.
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[...] Spinvox now translates 10million voice message to text every week with a 97% accuracy so c0-founder Christina Domecq. And you can now dictate your post to your blog so you can update whilst on the move. I need to try this when I am in the wilds of Scotland during August when I will be able to find a mobile phone signal on top of the Munroes but I will not be carrying my laptop up with me! Related articles by Zemanta [...]
[...] A previous post mentioned that Spinvox had drafted in Cambridge’s Tony Robinson to beef up the algorithms of Spinvox. However news on the BBC says that there are complaints that call-centres outside the UK are being used to “improve” the quality of the voice to text system. It is an enormous challenge to translate one voice-message to text let alone do millions on the fly. Spinvox says that they have 100 million customers round the world. [...]
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