Get Started By Ashruti Singh, SpinVox | 25 March 2009
Introduction
Hi! Welcome to SpinVox Create Developer Programme, the first step towards creating great speech applications! Here is a short read on what we do as a company, what the motivation behind the programme is and what you can expect from the API. Hope this note will help you learn more about the programme and give you a starting point to begin the development.
About SpinVox
SpinVox converts speech into text. It is the world’s largest commercial carrier class speech platform. Services offered by SpinVox are used every day by tens of millions of people worldwide for automatic delivery of converted speech to text through SMS, email and web messaging services.
Through pioneering innovations in voice and network technologies, SpinVox has brought together the two most natural forms of communication - voice and text - and created the fastest growing form of messaging: Voice-to-Content™.
At the heart of SpinVox is its ground-breaking Voice Message Conversion SystemTM (VMCS) - protected by over 60 patents worldwide, which works by combining state-of-the-art speech technologies with a live-learning language process developed by SpinVox Advanced Speech Group based in Cambridge University, UK.
SpinVox has developed many applications based on voice to content conversion. Its award-winning service has not only transformed voicemail, by converting voicemail to text for delivery as SMS or email message, but also empowered people to speak SMS messages or emails to anyone, from any phone.
SpinVox also enables people to speak messages directly to their favourite web messaging services such as Facebook, Twitter and many other popular web networks.
SpinVox serves customers directly as well as through many carriers like Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, Sasktel, Rogers Wireless, Telus, Telstra, Vodacom South Africa, Telstra Australia, Vodafone Spain, Movistar Chile, Livejournal and Skype.
Since its inception five years ago, SpinVox has achieved many milestones. It has handled more than 100 million messages in the last year alone, served customers across five continents, converted messages in English, German, French, Spanish and more recently in Portuguese and Italian. Yet, the journey has just begun and many more miles to go.
About Create and Conversion
So what’s the deal with the Create Programme? We have come this far on our own, but we believe we can go much further and faster by collaborating with you. SpinVox is enabling you to build great new products and services without the overhead of getting speech recognition to work at a commercial scale. We will seek to promote the best apps and services that you 'Create' and we’re therefore keen to follow your progress. Keep in touch with us in the programme forums and let us know how you’re getting on!
You will be able to build SMS, handset or web based applications and test them on our conversion system. This programme will provide you with an opportunity to put your ideas, on speech to text conversion, to the test. We will put our best foot forward to support you technically and functionally.
So, you will already have some expectations of the conversion system and its capability. SpinVox converts speech into meaningful text. Meaningful means consistently high quality messages that are reliably converted and should there be any uncertainty in the conversion, we are transparent about where the uncertainty is. Practically, there are a few things to bear in mind while you are developing and testing your applications.
Language Of The Message: Messages should be in English language. We will soon add other languages like Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese.
Duration Of The Message: Maximum acceptable length of the message will be 30 seconds.
Turn Around Time: Message will usually take a few minutes to convert, but it might take longer depending on the complexity of the message.
Typical Message: A typical converted message will look like this:
"Hi there. I was just returning your call about weekend for dinner. Not very sure. I'll let you know by tomorrow what it is looking like. Bye."- spoken through SpinVox
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Quotes: The message will be sent with the quote and unquote marks to make it look like it was spoken. |
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Spoken through SpinVox- There will be SpinVox tag line, spoken through SpinVox, at the end of the message. |
Special Characters: You may get some special characters in your conversion:
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Question Mark (?) - If the system is not very confident about the word then it will spell it out phonetically and insert a question mark next to the word, e.g.
"Hi Ashby(?), are you still working? Bye."- spoken through SpinVox
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Underscore - If the system is not able to understand any word due to poor audio quality then it will send an underscore in place of that word, like:
"Hi ___ here. My no. is 777777777. I repeat 777777777. Thank you."- spoken through SpinVox
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Unconverted Messages: The message might not get converted in some conditions. It may be because there was background noise when the message was recorded, or the language in which the message was recorded was not English, or the accent was not properly understood by the system, or the message was spoken very fast, or there were too many underscores or phonetic matches in the message, making it an unreliable conversion. In these cases the message might not get converted accurately or completely and you will get unconverted error message in return response.
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So, that’s some basic information on SpinVox conversion system. To start developing and testing applications, you will have to fill in a quick sign up form and register with us. You should download the developers’ guide from the documentation section of the website, which is the starting point for development. You may also find it valuable to join any of the forums and to download sample application code from the featured applications section.
But, please remember this is the beta version of SpinVox Create Developer Programme and we are still working on improving it. So, if you have any feedback or queries, please post them on the forum or email us at create.info@spinvox.com. We will try to fix issues and add more features as quickly as possible.
So, are you all set to SpinVox it now? |