Optus launches voice to text, but who's listening?

Stuart Corner
Monday, 07 December 2009 08:49

Your IT - Home IT

Optus has launched a voice to text message service for its mobile customers, powered by SpinVox, after announcing plans to do so back in April, but there have been reports that much of the voice to text conversion is undertaken by human operators.

Optus Voice to Text will allow Optus' mobile customers to convert spoken voicemail messages into text and receive them as a text message on their mobile phone. Once read, the message can be replied to, forwarded and saved. The caller's number is presented as the sender of the text to make it simple for customers to reply with a voice call or text.

An individual voice message can occupy up to three SMS and the full message also goes to voicemail as normal.

The service was launched by Telstra for its business customers in November 2007 and extended to all its mobile customers in February 2009. Optus announced in April  that it would launch the service later in the year. Skype made the service available to all its customers in March 2009.

According to Anandh Maistry, SpinVox VP for Asia Pacific, "Voice to text is a truly exciting category of voice service which is spreading across the globe at an impressive rate and is now the fastest-growing network service since SMS."

SpinVox claims to "convert messages for more than 30 million people worldwide" and says that and its Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS) "now contains more than two billion words and phrases derived from the equivalent of 72 years of audio training -making it the world's largest corpus of spoken language."

SpinVox says that "VMCS primarily uses speech recognition technologies to convert speech into text, but if it is not able to complete the conversion because words or phrases are indistinct, or a new word, phrase, brand name or colloquialism is used, then to ensure a high level of accuracy, it can ask a human agent for help, guiding them to the parts of the messages that need their assistance to ensure message accuracy continuously improves."

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