Voicemail-to-text software not so clever after all...

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 23 Jul 2009 at 09:53

An "automated" British service that converts voicemail messages into text is actually heavily dependent on human transcribers, according to the BBC.

Spinvox claims to turns voicemail messages into text using speech recognition software. "It captures spoken words and feeds them into a Voice Message Conversion System, known as D2 (the Brain), and spits them out as text content," Spinvox's website claims, adding that the system is "able to call on human experts for assistance".

However, according to a BBC investigation, it is the humans who are doing the bulk of the work, which has consequently led to doubts over the system's privacy.

The BBC claims the majority of Spinvox messages are transcribed by call centre staff in locations such as South Africa, Egypt and the Philippines.

"The machine doesn't understand anything," a member of the Egyptian call-centre staff told the BBC. "You have to start typing when you hear the message."

The BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones tested the theory by sending the same messages five times in a row. The transcript of each message was "radically different and pretty inaccurate," according to Cellan-Jones. "So unless Spinvox is employing a whole lot of rather confused computers to listen and transcribe messages, it sounds like the job was being done by a variety of agents," he concludes.

A spokesman for Spinvox told PC Pro that the company has "been absolutely clear that the system works through a combination of machine and human intelligence".

However, he refused to divulge the percentage of messages that require human transcription, claiming the information is commercially sensitive.

Privacy breach

The BBC also claims that staff at one of Spinvox's Egyptian call centres created a Facebook group, which included potentially sensitive commercial information from the calls they had transcribed. A spokesman for Spinvox claims this was only training data and no commercially sensitive data was involved.

The firm could also be in hot water with the authorities, as its entry on the UK Data Protection Register says it doesn't transfer anything outside the European Economic Area.

The Spinvox spokesman told PC Pro that "we absolutely conform with UK data regulations," claiming that all the company's data resides in the EU.