Is Spinvox Spinning Its Way Out Of Controversy?

In an intriguing story, the BBC has claimed that the speech to text messaging company, Spinvox, primarily depends upon outsourced call centres to transcribe voice messages instead of an automated tool as the firm touts.

A recent report by the broadcaster quoted a number of patent applications showing human intervention in the voice to text conversion services provided by the company.

It further quoted a US Spinvox customer who claimed to have received a message from a staffer at a call centre based in Pakistan. The message clearly shows that the company relies heavily on human involvement for delivering its services.

However, the company has finally admitted its dependence on outsourced call centres and started to back down from its previous claims that most of the translation is carried out by AI-based machine translation software.

Responding to the reports from the BBC, the head of social media at Spinvox James Whatley wrote in a blog post; “SpinVox only employs agents to step in when messages need analysis and the machine gets to decide. However, the agents in question will only ever hear/see the specific parts of the messages that need work on”.

In a related story, Spinvox also asserted it is “close to securing” new phase of funding this week, having seemingly utilised a major part of its $100 million funding, raised in March last year.