SpinVox, or Someone Like It, Keeps Spinning

Shortly after my piece earlier today suggesting that SpinVox needed a spin doctor, it seems that the company decided to take the title seriously. Someone posted a comment pointing to a SpinVox blog post as proof that the BBC article was flawed. And the vendor’s blog is going to be the accurate and fair version? It seems likely that the poster was either a PR person employed by the company or an employee or principle. But to be fair, I looked at the post and had a few reactions to some of the passages:

An article entitled `Voice technology firm under fire` was published by the BBC this morning written by Rory Cellan-Jones. It is the latest in a series of previously fair and accurate articles the BBC has written about SpinVox, but on this occasion the article contains a number of allegations over its privacy standards, technology, evidence offered by a Facebook group and finances which SpinVox believes are both incorrect and inaccurate.

The thing is, this hasn’t just been a BBC story and other journalists have looked into it, including at least one at The Register that has been a paid subscriber to the SpinVox service.

SpinVox takes security extremely seriously and ensuring the protection of data is core to the SpinVox ethos. To date, SpinVox has successfully managed millions of conversions, and has no history of breach of security.

Stressing how important the company finds security is fine, but that doesn’t negate the potential for security danger represented by having invididuals transcribing messages. I’m sure TJX was once able to boast that its IT systems had never been compromised, at least before that enormous data loss it had.

SpinVox is fully compliant with the Data Protection Act 1998 (“the Act”) and ensure that its processes and systems are designed to comply with all relevant data protection legislation. All information is held within secure hosting facilities, which are located in the UK.Being compliant with IT security regulations does not mean that a company has sufficiently safeguarded data, and the security issue is having people in various countries potentially having access to voice messages that might be confidential information.

SpinVox has a number of partners that assist in providing Quality Control to the SpinVox system. These are located both within and outside of the EEA. Based upon requests from carrier partners due to their own data protection requirements, SpinVox restricts to which of its partners information is provided.

They still must have access to the voice messages if they are to transcribe them, and so must any people outside the company that actually do any portion of the transcription.

SpinVox is permitted by way of the Act to process data outside of the EEA in compliance with certain requirements as set out in the Act. SpinVox ensures by way of its contractual arrangements and by way of its continued ISO 27001 compliance and rigorous internal controls that these requirements are met.

An ISO 9001 “quality” certification only says that the company has documented and controlled its processes. To use certification as some imprimatur of dependability is misdirection. Information security governs IT systems, but most security breaches historically have been through someone on the inside leaking information.

Quality certification also only goes to business processes, and not the results that customers get. And given some of the posts. like the one in The Register, about the steady degredation in the quality of the text versions of voice mails, that result to customer aspect is a pretty serious issue.

Claims have been made to the BBC, suggesting that the majority of messages have been heard and transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines. These are incorrect.

The real question is simple: What percentage of the messages are transcribed by call center personnel anywhere in the world? By talking only of a “majority” of messages as not being “transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines,” talks around the issue. Or are the only outsourced call centers in those two countries?

SpinVox has delivered world-leading breakthroughs in speech recognition and related technologies, developed by its Cambridge–based Advanced Speech Group - a highly qualified team of speech scientists working together with the world’s leading speech academics. This team is considered to be one of the largest commercial speech R&D teams world-wide.

In the past two years, the Cambridge ASG team has applied the latest research to create state-of-the-art techniques that today deliver a system that outperforms any equivalent speech technologies on accuracy, speed, scale, reliability and language range.

VMCS is continually evolving via a live-learning process, enabling an ever-increasing proportion of automated conversions.

This is nothing more than an extended appeal to authority by citing how “advanced” the systems are. It says nothing of how much of the transcription is done by people, not machines.

One of the key technology breakthroughs applied within VMCS enables it to ‘know what it doesn’t know’. VMCS can then refer a message to a human for assistance as required.

Oh, then it should be easy. What percent of the messages are handled through this system and what percentage are handled in a solely automated fashion? But the post doesn’t say.

Agents working in a Live environment have no knowledge of customer, individual, product, market or use – the data is fully locked down and guaranteed by the in-house developed tool suite.

Let me offer a hypothetical: “Jeff, it’s Rich. Our new XYZ servers are getting killed by A Corp.’s.” That’s an interesting bit of confidential information. Look up XYZ servers and A Corp. and who cares if you don’t have the ID of the specific telephone account?

The Facebook and accompanying blog page to which Cellan-Jones refers was posted an operator 18 months ago at an Egyptian call centre – RAYA - and clearly demonstrates that they were using training data – a model system that SpinVox uses to evaluate the quality of call centre support before contracting with the supplier to handle real user data. The training system will require individuals to convert full messages in order to establish their speed and accuracy.

Then how about explaining how the BBC reporter could get multiple different “translations” of the message he left?

In just five years, SpinVox has established itself as the world leader in speech conversion technologies, systems design and establishing a brand new category in communications - voice-to-content.

The world leader? There are many other companies, some that have been around for decades, which would and could dispute such a claim. And one in the space now is a little firm called Google. Ever hear of them? Then there is EveryZing, the BBN spin-off that is doing real-time translation of audio for some big media companies. Don’t they count?

SpinVox is growing fast – it currently has over 30 million live users and will service over 100 million by the end of 2009 with 28 carriers across five continents. It currently operates profitably and will be cash-flow positive during 2009.

Well enough, if that’s a really open and honest portrayal of the finances. But what does “cash-flow positive during 2009″ mean? In total by the end of the year? All through the year? And operates profitably sounds like it might be different from “is profitable.”

SpinVox routinely offers its employees the opportunity to benefit from the success of the company through share ownership either through award of options as part of an employment package or at anniversaries, through save as you earn schemes and occasional offers. Our current offer has been taken up by over 50 per cent of the company.

Does that mean that the offer wasn’t stock in lieu of cash payment, which would be different from an options award? Again, the company doesn’t directly deny reporters’ statements.

By the way, if you’re from a company I have covered and disagree with what I had to say, you’re welcome to contact me. Trying to sneak something in anonymously is only asking to be publicly mocked.

Image via stock.xchng user ledomira, site standard license.