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.

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.

Blabnote.com – Vocal Social Network

I’ve got 5 invites to the brand new voice powered social network Blabnote to give away. This new application, currently in private beta, promises to give users access to advanced communication tools, ad-hoc creation of contact conference groups and industrial strength feature rich voice mail and messaging. To win an invite, drop me an email and the first 5 to land will get one.

Edit: Too late! All gone! Leave a comment and i’ll get back to you if I get any more invites to distribute.

Thinking Digital: 21-23 May 2008

I’m off to the Thinking Digital conference at The Sage Gateshead this time next week. Billed as an ‘event where outstanding individuals gather to take part in an exclusive conversation about technology, ideas and our future’ it’s a great chance to see some of the best speakers the planet has to offer in action. Highlights on offer include:

Steve Clayton, Microsoft’s Software plus Services Lead and all round top bloke, demonstrating some of the coolest new technologies to come out of Redmond, including what’s expected to be a first UK demo of Live Mesh.

The Fake Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Dan Lyons, Senior Editor at Forbes), author of Internet sensation The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, giving his unique, hilarious take on the world of technology, the people who drive it, and the future of media.

Greg Dyke, Chairman of the British Film being interviewed live on stage by Andy Allan, the former CEO of Carlton Television, about management and leadership challenges, as well as his views on the future of media.

World-renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil speaking via stunning Teleportec technology about his groundbreaking work on The Singularity and the point at which computer intelligence will surpass our own, in every form.

Hopefully it should be clear to you that with such a lineup set to appear, I’m more than a little excited to be one of the lucky 400 who gets to attend!

How to Build Your Very Own VOIP Telecommunication Platform

I thought Christmas was over, but it obviously isn’t. Some hardware arrived in the office this week – but not just any old hardware. For the price of a decent size family car, my employers ( the mighty Qire ) have bought me and the team everything we need to build our very own VOIP/ SIP/ IVR / VXML / CCXML telco!!!!

The kit is a development environment to enable us to build the worlds biggest and best Voice 2.0 telecommunication platform. It’s a reference architecture for us to get to grips with the finer points of SIP call initiation and interaction.

If you want to do the same, all you need is a handful of top flight super fast servers, some expensive text to speech, speech recognition licenses, a friendly SIP provider and some high spec military grade DSP boards.

It’s all powered by a custom build high performance C# management and delivery system that we have put together.

Once it is all working together, we will have a system that will give our clients access to the planets most advanced unified communications platform!

Exciting stuff I’m sure you will agree! Stay posted and I’ll keep the blog updated with our progress.