J-dee.com

Spinvox is Really Disappointing

I have tried, I really have, to try out Spinvox, the service that converts spoken word to text, but each time I try, I’ve been left wanting.

The first time I tried to sign up for the voicemail offering I hit a brick wall: no real support for PAYG on the Orange network. I purposely choose to go pay as you go as being in the line of work I am, I always need to be in the position to change to the latest and greatest model of mobile there is. I was running an N95 and thought I’d give Spinvox a go, but no Orange PAYG meant no service.

Things are a little different now though. My employers, the mighty Qire have got me a brand spanking IPhone to test out so I thought I’d give Spinvox another go,  but this time using the much touted live blogging service as the IPhone comes with the absolutely awesome Visual Voicemail feature built in. I’m off on holidays and then a raft of conferences so the ability to blog by voice on the go seemed like something I should at least try out. So I did……

It’s rubbish. The blogging service is utterly unusable as the duration of the recording you are allowed to make to have transcribed is about 30 seconds! Completely useless for anything other than "hello mum" style Twitter updates, and not a service that anyone who takes their blogging efforts seriously would want to use. I don’t want War & Peace transcribing, but give me a break. A post half  the size of the one you are reading is not unreasonable surely?

That, along with the fact I can’t find any pricing details on the Spinvox site, the account management tools are sparse and user-hostile, and suggestions that the quality of the transcription is not up to much anyway, means I won’t be giving it another go. I’m pretty sure I could knock together a better service myself with ASP.NET, VXML and the mass distributed cloud workforce of Mechanical Turk in a weekend anyway. At least then I could set the recording length to something usable.

Silverlight 2 in the wild

We have just completed the first release of our enterprise level cloud telecom solution called Qore here at Qire in Liverpool. It is the worlds most advanced multi-channel communications platform and we are really proud of what we have all achieved. My colleague Paul has especially worked magic on what is has been a really ambitious project.

Now that the main objectives have been met, we have a little time to add a few nice bells and whistles to add that little sprinkling of fairy dust that makes good software better. So what could be nicer than cracking open Silverlight 2 and knocking together some cool data visualisation tools.

The first is a big client network monitor display that is going to deployed on a enormous plasma screen stuck to the wall to give the whole company visibility of any issues that our A-List clients have while using the application. We can pre-empt any problems and offer a greater level of service by offering clients help before they even ask for it. Pretty snazzy. Check the video below ( starring Katy, who is captured here between moments of moaning about the cold and making a brew. Plus you get a quick tour of my desktop art gallery.

Silverlight 2 Client Network Monitor from jon on Vimeo.

The second little control is a call visualisation control that will be embedded in Qore to show call details and narrative in a much more interactive fashion. I’ll edit and post the video later as Vimeo is playing up right now.

So that’s it, a little demonstration of what we are making in Silverlight 2; controls to help our clients and improve business processes, hopefully giving you the idea is useful for more than just trivial applications.

MicroBlog Update

• Those lovely people at Zendesk have sent me a Buddha Machine! Lovely! http://www.zendesk.com/ http://www.buddha-machine.com/
• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 released. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx
• AppDev Silverlight 2 training DVD is excellent http://www.appdev.com/prodfamily.asp?catalog%5Fname=AppDevCatalog&category%5Fname=XS2Product
• Layer Blending in WPF looks exceptionally powerful http://rakeshravuri.blogspot.com/2008/08/blending-modes-in-wpf-using.html

Wordpress for Iphone

I’m currently sitting in the back of a taxi writing this post on my new iPhone using a very nifty little wordpress client. I have got to admit that I gave never been an apple fanboy but this truly an inspiring bit of hardware.

Come and work for Qire in Liverpool: Marketing Executive position available

If you know one end of a Purple Cow from another, know who Clay Shirky is and know the difference between blogging and twittering, then we want to hear from you.  We are looking for a motivated and creative marketing executive to work closely with the software and sales team to evangelise about our products and services, and take advantage of all the good stuff that the modern web has to offer.

You will have excellent offline and organisational skills too, as they will be needed while working for the world’s most innovative voice application software provider here in sunny Liverpool. Your research skills will help us to move into any target market we wish, by providing us with sales collateral and insight; plus your keen eye for design and the written word will keep us ahead of the pack by understanding the visual language a bleeding edge cloud based telecom provider needs to speak.

Interested? Use the contact form or send us your CV and we will be in touch.

MicroBlog Update

• Hmm thinking about Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams as a way of visualising VXML documents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi-Shneiderman_diagram
• Dynamic modules in Silverlight 2 via a similar process to my beloved System.Activator trick http://www.theadvents.com/?p=11