On Tuesday next week, along with a few other journalists and bloggers, I’ll be visiting SpinVox HQ in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. SpinVox will be demonstrating their technology to us and they will be taking questions about the recent scandal surrounding the company’s speech-to-text technology.
Here’s the invitation I received from them today:
How Does SpinVox Convert Voice to Text?
I know you are interested in finding out more about how the SpinVox Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS) converts millions of voice messages to text, so I am pleased to invite you to our Marlow Headquarters for a technical briefing where you will see the VMCS in action and get to try it for yourself.You’ll get the chance to speak a number of your own messages to see how they go through the automation system. You’ll see how, as the messages get increasingly complex, the system might refer them to a Quality Control (QC) agent for checking or completion to ensure that they meet our quality standards.
During the demo you can get hands-on, acting as a QC agent, so that you can see both sides of the process. You will get first-hand experience of how the application works and how quickly the messages go through.
This is the first time that SpinVox has offered demonstrations of its VMCS and we hope you’ll take the time to come and see it. We’ll be running the introduction to VMCS and the demos on Tuesday 04 August, from 10.00-11.00am and from 11.30-12.30pm. In addition to the demonstration, there will, of course, be an opportunity to ask questions.
So I’ve got two questions for TechCrunch readers:
(1) What would you like me to ask the SpinVox bosses? Any burning questions?
(2) What should I feed in to the machine to be converted?
Leave your questions and suggestions in the comments below.
Update: I just spoke to Rory Cellan-Jones on the telephone and it seems his invitation was lost in the mail. But Rory’s not too sore about it: he’ll be in Mallorca anyway.