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.

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.