BBC: Spinvox voice recognition relies on call centre workers
Posted
by
Dominic Ponsford
on 23 July 2009
at 08:39
Tags: New Media, Online
A BBC investigation has raised a number of questions about a voice recognition technology company which has sold its service to numerous news websites and blogs.
Spinvox claims to “capture spoken words and feed them into a Voice Message Conversion System, known as ‘D2’ (the Brain), and spit them out as text content”.
It has been used by blogs and website as another way of encouraging reader participation by allowing readers to call a number and then see their speech converted into text web posts via Spinvox.
The BBC reports today that the technology may have been overstated reporting claims that “the majority of messages have been heard and transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines”.
The BBC has spoken to one call centre worker who said: “The machine doesn’t understand anything. You have to start typing when you hear the message.”
