Optus to offer SpinVox voice to text service for mobile customers

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 22 April 2009 05:42

IT Industry - Strategy

Optus will follow Telstra in offering the SpinVox VoiceMail To Text service to its mobile customers later this year.

SpinVox converts incoming voicemails to text messages and delivers them as an SMS to the subscriber's mobile. Telstra launched its Voice2Text service to its business users in November 2007,   followed by rollout to its consumer base in February 2009 .
 
Optus will not provide any information on pricing or availability, such as whether it will be offered to business and consumer customers and to both pre and postpaid customers. Telstra gives consumer customers the option of paying $15 per month for 500 messages or $5 per month and 40 cents per message. Its service is not available to prepaid customers.

According to SpinVox, its technology uses a combination of voice recognition, artificial intelligence and natural linguistics to convert the spoken message to text. iTWire has had a trial of Telstra's service and can confirm that its recognition abilities are excellent - even translating accurately a background conversation taking place some distance from the handset.

On the Telstra service, longer messages are converted to multiple SMS, maximum three and if SpinVox's recognition falls below a certain threshold the message is delivered to voicemail only.  There is generally a delay of about five minutes between the message being left and it appearing on the user's handset.

SpinVox is now live with Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, Sasktel, Rogers Wireless, Telus, Telstra, Vodacom South Africa, Vodafone Spain, Movistar Chile, Skype and Livejournal. It went live on Skype last month, 18 months after plans were first announced.