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

Stuart Corner
Monday, 07 December 2009 08:49

Your IT - Home IT

Certainly with the Telstra service there is nothing warning callers that their message might be directed to a human operator. And there have been suggestions, denied by SpinVox, that the service uses human operators at call centres in South Africa and the Philippines to a great extent.

The BBC in July reported that it had "spoken to Kareem Lucilius, who said he worked for six months at the call centre, alongside as many as 150 others. He said that after initial training, he went on to transcribe live messages. Asked what part machines played he said, 'It was done 100 percent by people'."

The BBC subsequently claimed to have seen SpinVox patents that it said confirmed the extent of human involvement. Again its claims were denied by SpinVox. The same report claimed that operators had tagged their own messages on to the end of transcriptions complaining of not being paid.

Stuart Kelly, SpinVox head of product marketing - APAC, told iTWire that human involvement was the last of several stages, starting with voice recognition, in message processing, but declined to say what percentage of messages went to a human operator, citing "competitive intelligence." He added that Spinvox complied with all privacy and security requirements wherever it operated and said that operators had no means of identifying either the calling or called party's number, and no means of retaining or copying messages.

There have certainly been reports of financial problems at SpinVox, and the business was up for sale earlier this year. In late November The Register carried a report of layoffs, cost cutting and cash shortages.

Minority shareholder, Invesco Perpetual AiM VCT plc, reported  in August  that it had written down its holding in SpinVox, 'saying "the business has been put up for sale, and it is possible that, should a good sales price be achieved, the new valuation may be exceeded."

Kelly declined to confirm the sale rumours, saying "when you are fast growing company there is always speculation about a possible sale."

All new Optus consumer and small and medium business post-paid mobile customers will automatically receive a 14 day free trial of Optus Voice to Text when they activate their service. Existing Optus consumer and small and medium business mobile customers can opt in to the 14 day free trial by texting the word "ON" to 7746. The standard fee for the service is $6.99 per month, which includes unlimited messages. Details are at www.optus.com.au/voicetotext