SpinVox

» see spinvox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The pitch was one of those things that sounds obvious the moment you hear it. Nobody wants to listen to voicemail. Everybody reads text messages. So put a machine between the two, and the message someone left you at 11pm arrives on your screen as words you can scan in four seconds. SpinVox started selling that in 2003 out of Marlow, a town on the Thames west of London, and it sold it well enough to raise something like 200 million dollars.

It was a carrier product, not an app. You did not download SpinVox, your network operator switched it on, and the transcript arrived from a number you had never saved. That made the company dependent on a small number of very large customers and it made the underlying technology invisible to everyone using it, which turned out to matter.

Christina Domecq and Daniel Doulton had built the kind of company British technology press wanted to exist. The losses were enormous and openly reported, 36 million pounds against 2 million in revenue for 2007, but that was normal for the era and the growth story covered it. What the story rested on was an automated speech engine the company referred to as the brain, and the claim that human operators only stepped in at the edges to improve accuracy.

SpinVox lived at the carrier layer, and the carriers that mattered to it were British. Turkish networks never carried it, so the only way this product could reach me is the way it eventually did, years later and as a story about a company that said machine and meant people.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

In July 2009 Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC published what he had been told by people inside the operation. Voicemail audio was leaving the European Union for call centers in South Africa and the Philippines, which looked like a breach of the company's own entry on the UK Data Protection Register. And most of the transcription was not being done by the brain at all. It was being typed by people, listening to strangers' messages.

The company's response was that yes, human operators were used to improve conversion accuracy, which was true and also not the point. Customers had left messages about medical results and money and affairs into what they understood to be a machine. The word for the gap between those two things is not a technical word.

~ the actual end ~

The finances came apart in the same season. Staff were asked in July 2009 to take part of their salary in stock. By August there were shareholder allegations of financial irregularities circulating, and in September Invesco Perpetual wrote its investment down by ninety percent. On 30 December 2009 Nuance Communications agreed to buy the company for 102.5 million dollars, roughly half of what had gone in. Investors got about fifty cents on the dollar.

The consumer service did not last long under the new owner. On 18 May 2010 users on free accounts got a text saying SpinVox was no longer supporting them and their service would expire within days. Nobody was told to fix their call divert settings, so a lot of people discovered the shutdown by finding their voicemail had quietly stopped reaching them at all.

~ what it became ~

Nuance kept the technology and dropped the brand, folding voicemail-to-text into a telco-only product you could not subscribe to directly. Nuance was later bought by Microsoft. The transcription of a voice into text stopped being a company and became a checkbox inside a phone, which is where it sits now, doing the job for free and without anybody in a call center.

The thing worth keeping is the shape of the lie rather than the lie itself. SpinVox did not claim to do something impossible. It claimed to already be doing something that was about eight years away, and it filled the gap with people it did not talk about. That pattern did not end in 2010.

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