SpinVox, the leading UK speech-to-text voicemail service, is setting up shop here in San Francisco as it expands into converting the social conversations of the Web 2.0 crowd into the written word.

SpinVox started out using its speech-recognition technology to offer a time-saving conversion of voicemails into text transcripts, which are emailed to its users.

In May, it announced a deal with San Francisco’s Six Apart that allows its 12m LiveJournal members to post by voice over the phone to their blogs.

Now it is voice-enabling SMS messages and email, helping Twitter users to post by voice. Further development work is taking place in unified messaging for the corporate market.

Christina Domecq, chief executive, who was in the city this week to open the new offices, describes SpinVox as a “global managed service provider” that is now working with five carriers in the US to deploy “voice-to-screen” voicemail services.

She sees competition emerging from the big players such as Microsoft, which bought Tellme in March, Google, which is working on speech recognition for mobile search and has bought GrandCentral, and Nuance.

There are also smaller players already offering a similar service to SpinVox in the shape of SimulScribe, CallWave and Jott.

Daniel Doulton, vice president of strategy and development, claims SpinVox has a superior technology, protected now by over 40 patents, which delivers more accurate transcripts whether the language is English, French, German or Spanish.

SpinVox earns revenues “per event” from carriers – whenever a voicemail is converted to text by a premium service. But with messages being literally spelt out, the possibility of contextual ads being included is also being explored.

July 19th, 2007 in Internet, Telecommunications | Permalink