Time for British company Spinvox to go
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: When Spinvox, British voicemail-to-text Company was launched in 2003, it won acclaim for its innovative use of speech recognition technology and its future looked bright. Nothing was known at that time that the company once known as the rising star in the British technology companies will lose both its name and recognition within a few years.
US based Nuance Communications, a speech-recognition company is about to take over Spinvox, for US$150 million. The reason behind the turmoil in the company is accredited to the failure of some of the promising contracts with major operators.
Last year, the company was allegedly accused of using human intervention†rather than automatic translation of the voicemails. However, Christine Domecq, the founder of the company declined the allegations saying that human intervention is used only when the technology can’t get a fix on the spoken word.
Even after the controversy, Spinvox succeeded in signing deals with big telcos and mobile service providers like Telefonica in South America and Telstra of Australia. However, Spinvox munched its way through more than $150 million of backer’s cash and was close to collapse. Invesco’s, smaller Spinvox backer, market statement indicating that Spinvox was up for sale made the things worse.
Though Spinvox’s account for 2008 is still to be filed at Companies House in London, there is rumour that in the year the company lost some $80 million on sales of $15 million.
Pantech Adds RealSpeak
Pantech is adding text-to-speech capabilities to select handset models. Nuance Communications’ RealSpeak Mobile will initially be available on three different Pantech phones and will support three languages.
The RealSpeak Mobile SF from Nuance is a text-to-speech engine designed to convert text into synthesized speech. RealSpeak Mobile has been embedded in three Pantech devices, the PG-6200, PG-8000 and PG-3700.
The Nuance solution, according to Pantech, will power its handsets in multiple languages, including Russian, English and Mandarin Chinese. The products are already available in the Russian and Taiwanese markets, Pantech says.
In other Pantech news, the handset manufacturer introduced the Pantech C3, an enhanced version the C300 camera flip phone. At launch, C3, which is said to be the smallest camera phone on market, comes equipped with both Secret Blue and Silver face plates, but the company plans to introduce other colors and styles in the near future.
Cingular Wireless has exclusive rights to offer the C3, which allows users to share photos and songs with friends, hand-select and assign MP3 ringtones. The handset also supports various instant messaging services and sports a color screen, large fonts and a VGA camera with flash and zoom.
The Pantech C300 camera flip phone is available through Cingular as well. The carrier offers the handset as an option for its prepaid GoPhone wireless customers.
Source- wirelessweek Wireless Mobile Telecom
