Greetings Adventurers,

How have you been? What have you been up to and what have you seen?

Me? I’ve not been too bad thanks. I’m writing to you today to let you know that the SpinVox Speech Mobsters have been out and about on a few adventures of their own lately.

First I get an alert telling me that they’ve been ‘roughing’ it down in Pilton at the Glastonbury Festival, (of all things), assisting all and sundry Love the Farm by making sure they Leave No Trace…

Good on them!

…Then, word reaches my ears that they have also been off gallavanting around San Francisco TAKING PRIDE in supporting certain events that MAY have something to do with a certain MTV campaign entitled: Stand By What You Say

Make of that what you will… Scandal?!
All this talk about sex, shocking.

More. Soon.

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

This past Sunday, May 18th, SpinVox sponsored the first ever Food 2.0 event -

Codename - “Nom Nom Nom“

(we like that)

The Food 2.0 “Nom Nom Nom” event was the first ever Masterchef-esque event for the digital world.

Featuring 24 bloggers who like to cook food, review food, bake food, blog food, fry food, grill food, mix food, photo food… Nom Nom Nom was the place to be.

Basically anyone who had a passion for all things foodie and digi (digi-food?) came together to cook a three course meal, for four people, in just under (more like just over - ahem) two and a half hours!

And boy were they competitive! Yours truly was on hand that day and I can tell you, even though there was an overall feeling of camaraderie throughout the day you could almost cut the competitive air with a knife…

…see what I did there? “Cut it with a knife?” - And it’s a cooking event?! HA! Love it!

Blogging through SpinVox was definitely the ‘order of the day’ for me too…

“This is my shopping list so I can read it later. Vine tomatoes, whole juicy cucumber, iceberg lettuce, two lemons, lots of fresh mince, need some red peppers, some kidney beans, some vegetarian mince I think. And some herbs. Some eggs.” - Spoken through SpinVox

…or maybe I should get it re-named to ‘Shopping List through SpinVox’, what do you think?

Nah. Doesn’t scan so well. Maybe not -

Anyway -
The competition for Food 2.0 is far from over.

The contestants now get judged on their overall content from the day.
So that’s foody photos, videos, blog posts… Everything!

All entries to be up by May 28th.

And hey, it’s all for a good cause too!

Keep an eye on The Official Nom Nom Nom Website for updates. More to follow here soon.

In the meantime…

Why not head over to the flickr page and feast your eyes…

(enough with the puns now please?)

…on some of the culinary treats that were made that day.

Also, keep your eye out for a very special, extremely limited…

SpinVox Speech Mobster: Chef Edition

———————–>

Bon appetite!

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There’s something up in the SpinVox Kitchen and the Mobsters want in…

What are they are up to?

And so it was, just over a week ago now, a bunch of like-minded folk from the Club of Tuttle - aka The Social Media Cafe - came together to talk about what the future holds for that thing we take for granted so much and yet defines us in such a multitude of ways, Voice.

That’s us there look ^ just before it all got very deep and intense!

- Pic Courtesy of RachelC

James Scroggs, VP of Consumer Business here at SpinVox, kicked things off with a quick psycho-metricgame for everyone (is that what you called it James?), which while not only being a lot of fun it also turned up some nice surprises about one’s self. I won’t go into the details here lest the game be ruined for you if you ever get a chance to play. Needless to say - it certainly broke the proverbial ice.

The results of aforementioned activity served as quite a nice segway into James’ introduction -
James - over to you:

“I’ve long held that people have lost their voice – call it the stuttering of the democratic process, not in having a right to vote or the mechanic to do so, but the real sense that a person’s voice can count for something, be purposeful, weighty, and heard amongst the din of Rice Crispy culture and politics.

I spent five years at MTV striving to have a 25 year old brand continue to earn its place as a platform for young people to have a voice in a formalised broadcast environment, while YouTube and the new social nooks and crannies became the new playground.

Now I find myself in the realms of a brilliant system, SpinVox, that can make the human voice matter again. How? Because SpinVox takes a voice – literally the energy in motion of particles in the air - and converts it into text data. That data can then be posted as content into the digital world.

It’s a revolution: for me, voice is the last human faculty that has not been obfuscated or complicated by the advances of science. It remains entirely naked, and therefore a pure expression of your ID, your self.

If only 30% of the language processed by our system is Dictionary-documented, then the complexities and personalities contained in the spoken language and vernacular suggest that the voice continues to be an immensely powerful tool for us all to emotional connect with each other, create and find social order.

So what is the future of voice?
What’s is its summit of its mountainous journey?”

And lo, the discussion began.

Would it be crass to say that towards the end, as the two hour session came to a close, my brain genuinely hurt. I kid you not. Some of the future-thinking being thrown around the table was simply extraordinary.

Things like -

(and this is just stream of consciousness stuff that I wrote during the session - so excuse the randomness)

Homogeneous. Tribal. Individual. Tagging conversations. Semantics. Granularity. Language switchers. Addressability. Capturing voice. Search voice. Indexing. Projection. Personas. Same message, same language, same person, different voice. Meta tags. Waves and particles. Habitual. Instant Capture. Capturing original thought. Reference points. Sociagraph => Vocal-graph. Having something to say. Having the right to say something. Naming conventions. ‘Blogging’ is alien to most, writing a diary isn’t. Speaking a blog, more alien. Speaking your diary? Potentially easier. Timelines of speech. SpinVox as a social tool. Enable = Empower.

There’s so much still spinning around upstairs - a lot of thought around voice/speech/personas etc -

While that’s stewing - why not have a read of some of the other output that has hit teh interwebz since last week…

First - starting off lightly - Francine talks about her game interpretations.
Next - getting deeper - Terence nails some of the open questions that have got him thinking
Then - Sizemore, on behalf of the Tuttle, hints that the event itself may’ve ruined his day (in a good way)

Also - and this was just lovely - Ben Robinson - who sadly couldn’t make it on the day - has put up his thoughts over at IntoMobile. Nice one Ben.

Finally, big thanks to all that attended:

Roger, Rachel, Sizemore, Terence, Ciaran, Ewan, Laura, Jay, Rob, Benjamin, Lloyd, Francine, Toby, Anne Marie and…
…if I’ve missed anyone off please shout!

The feedback has been great and I think there is definitely scope for a similar event at some point in the near future…

Watch this space.

PS - If you’ve got anything to add, (or if you’ve written up your thoughts somewhere), let me know in the comments and I’ll amend accordingly!

What is it and what does it mean? Want to join the debate? Well you can!
This Friday, why not join SpinVox for a coffee and a croissant at the Social Media Cafe, London.

The Cafe itself, or The Tuttle Club (as it is often fondly referred to as), runs from 10am ’til 1pm above The Coach & Horses on Greek St.
Not far from Tottenham Court Road, (map here).

Afterwards, (once the coffee has been finished and the croissants have been munched), SpinVox will be staying on for a couple of hours to host a discussion in and around The Future of Voice.

What are we talking about?
Well…

SpinVox converts VOICE into TEXT. This much we know, but let’s examine it further.

On one side of the table you’ve got what is fundamentally, a basic utility service that every phone should come with and will one day (very soon) be as ubiquitous across handsets and networks as SMS and email.

Great stuff, but on the other, if you follow the rabbit hole a little deeper, put some meaty thinking around it, what else does it mean?
What else does ‘voice to text’ enable?

Well - SpinVox captures spoken moments which before, without SpinVox, would’ve been lost into the ether.

Capturing your words, your *voice*, and storing them at a place of your choice, for as long you need/require is something that is still relatively new, somewhat esoteric and yet also extremely exciting.

Keeping these thoughts in mind, once your voice IS written down, when you can really see it, what does your voice actually look like?

No I’m not talking about sound waves or pretty patterns on an oscilloscope, but your actual VOICE. The words you use to articulate your thoughts are similar and yet also completely different to those of the person sitting beside you.

Your canter, your meter, your lexicon, your vocabulary, your linguistic gymnastics that you may or may not choose to engage, the way you throw your words together, all of that… They define who you are.

If you saw your voice written down, could you place it?
Could you tell yours from someone else’s? Could you spot yours at a hundred yards?

This literal voice recognition is something I’ve come to enjoy when I’ve received ambling, meandering voicemails (converted into text messages) from my friends.
And it surprises the hell out of them when often I send them the same message back…

If you lost your voice and you had to put up a ‘missing’ poster, what would it say?
What does your voice actually look like?

On top of all that lofty thinking you need to understand that this kind of stuff is happening right now. Millions of people are doing it every week and now, out of the blue, the term ‘voice to text’ is changing slightly…
Suddenly it becomes ‘voice to content’. Your words become searchable. SEARCHING VOICE. That’s something quite special.

It is oft-said that ‘Only by truly enabling something, do you truly empower people to do anything’.

We’ve enabled the notion of ‘voice to content’ – now what does that empower you to do?

If you’re interested in coming along (to the SMC and/or to the discussion afterwards) please either sign up at the LondonSocialMediaClubWiki or email me directly here: james.whatley@spinvox.com

See you there!

So I had this super duper, uber-fantastic CTIA blog post that I was just about to hit ‘Publish’ on…

…when all of a sudden this video lands on my desk.

Brilliant.

SpinVox @ CTIA - c/o our friends at Heist Projects - Cheers!

Tony Carter, it’s over to you…

Sings:

“VIVA LAS VEGAS! VIVA LAS VEGAS!”

And I’m pretty certain that won’t be for the last time either… Hehehe.

Just a quick note to mention that SpinVox is off to the 2008 CTIA Wireless Conference this week.
The show itself runs from April 1-3 and will be hosted at the Las Vegas Convention Center which is in… er… Las Vegas!

You can find us at Booth 6603 - So if you want to come say ‘Hi’ then that’s where we’ll be.

I’m flying out tomorrow to (amongst other things) assist with the building of the stand (again).
You may remember that we caused quite a stir at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona with all our many Mobsters… 2000 to be exact!

Well, we’ve shipped the whole stand to Las Vegas; SpinVox is coming to town and we’re bringing our army of Mobsters with us!

I don’t have any exclusive pictures/videos yet, (like before), but I HAVE managed to lay my hands on the final TOP SECRET design/blueprint…

Shh… Not sure I’m supposed to have this ^ but to hell with it!
It’s not like anyone’s gonna copy us is it?!

And finally…

You may or may not be aware that yours truly was interviewed for the extremely well-respected Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 regarding blogging for SpinVox…

If you missed it then you can read all about it via the two links below…

First Rory Cellan-Jones, Chief Technology Correspondent for the BBC, writes up his thoughts on “The Business of Blogging“

And second - Neil Bird, founder of technology blog ‘iGadget Life‘, gets an honourable mention for being the first blogger to report the story (and for also doing the hard work and hosting the exact clip from the show - you can listen to it here)

…Nice one Neil!

A SpinVox Speech Mobster… as modelled by Elle ‘The Body’ Macpherson

Image c/o www.socialitelife.com

Back from Mobile World Congress and back from Barcelona and back to the day to day business of turning voice, into text.

And WHY has it taken so long to update this here blog of ours?
Well… I can tell you. You MAY have noticed from the pictures that we had JUST A FEW little men - aka “Speech Mobsters” - on the SpinVox stand.

Two thousand of them in fact!

And behind those two thousand we had a further five hundred. Packed away all secretly like and ONLY given away to those folk who we REALLY liked
Thing is - we kinda underestimated how popular this little piece of ’schwag’ would be and the poor little blighters disappeared in no time!
So as it turns out - word has got around that owning a genuine ‘Speech Mobster’ is cooler than a snowman’s cool bits - and my email inbox has literally been flooded with requests…

First they started out with the normal kind of thing - “Where can I get one?“
Then the demands of “Whatley, you owe me Sonny Jim! You HAVE to get me one!“
Finally to the scary “I’ll swap you my Gran and a week’s worth of biscuits…“

I’m sorry to disappoint folks. There are NONE left! Even the one that I had in my keeping got stolen from desk whilst I was in Barcelona last week, (nice huh?).
So listen, if you’re reading this and you got one of these:

You are one of the lucky ones.
Guard it well

If you *didn’t* get one of these but still consider yourself a friend of SpinVox - i.e.: You REALLY want a Mobster! - then I might have a way to get you one.
Basically I’m currently trying to pull every string possible to get another one into my hands.

Watch this space - when I do, I’ll make sure that the readers have this blog get a chance to win their very own Speech Mobster…

Until next time,

J

PS - Have you seen Mobby?

HALLO! …and HOLA!

(again)

From all of us at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona!

It’s been “GO GO GO!” since we started yesterday (hence the lack of updates - TOO BUSY!) but the SpinVox stand.. and everyone working in and around it, has been going fantastically well..

“The best stand at the congress…“ I heard one person say.

And our Speech Mobsters are like gold dust - you only get one if you’re VERY special…

I’ve been taking some photos around the stand and I thought I’d put them on here to share with you!

All comments welcome

If you’re at MWC - Why not come say Hi?

If you’re NOT at MWC - you can still get your message through by calling me, James Whatley on +447825798998…

Leave a voicemail and I’ll send the converted text message to the board in the pictures..

Now how’s THAT for a slice of fried gold?!

CALL NOW!