Speaking Freely

“I’ve been trying out this new service called SpinVox and it’s something that Steven Frye just blogged(?) about on his blog. It’s quite incredible. You basically speak into the phone and some sort of voice recognition software works out the saying and turns it into text. It’s really quite impressive. So I blame another reason for me procrastinating and not getting my college work done on Steven Frye this time anyway.”

spoken through SpinVox

The text above was automatically transcribed by Spinvox, a new service which (so they say) uses speech recognition technology to turn words spoken over the phone into text. After it did that it automatically posted the text to this blog. As you can see it hasn’t spelt Stephen Fry’s name perfectly, and the question mark after ‘blogged’ means that it didn’t know the word so transcribed it phonetically. Nevertheless, other than trimming off three words of waffle at the end of the post above (the block above is about the maximum it will let you record), I haven’t touched it all, so it really is quite impressive.

Blogging is only a secondary application of Spinvox – my mobile phone’s voicemail now uses it, so when I get a voicemail it is sent to me as a text message a few minutes later.

Possibly related posts:

• Flickr toy fuels week-end productivity slump
• The death of the English language?
• Wrong number
• I complained to the PCC about the Daily Mail M.E. poll the other week – here’s their reply. #CFS
• Meh.