A previous post mentions how Spinvox has turned to the Cambridge Cluster to accelerate their software. Gigaom says that “London startup SpinVox raised $100 million today in a round of financing that values the company at $500 million. That’s big money for a company that translates voicemails into text, but SpinVox appears to have achieved some valuable intellectual property associated with its speech-to-text software. Currently it can transcribe in French, Spanish, English and German; the funding will help it add Italian, Portuguese and Arabic to its repertoire.” That is a very impressive valuation. The software trascribes in many different languages but when will it be able to handle millions of simultaneous calls.
Will Spinvox be able to help Doble Quality Foods and many other similar companies which rely on people submitting orders by phone. Currently Doble takes many orders, particularly outside the normal working day, by people leaving messages on an answerphone. These all have to be listened to and “de-coded” as some of the messages are not clear and the customers are working in busy kitchens. It would be great if the customer could receive a text message confirming the order. Of course it would be even better if the customers all used the Internet but that is some time away. I suppose small companies like Doble could use call centres to accept the orders but it is good to offer a local service. After al, Doble customers can phone up until 06:30 and still make the delivery round.
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