Hey there ‘Voxers…

(yeah – I just said that)

How goes it? Good weekend? Work hard? Play hard? Good. Glad to hear it…
Me? I chilled out, relaxed had fun… But hey, that’s not why I’m here! Well, I *am* here to have fun, but I’m not here to tell you about my weekend. I’m here to tell you about Ping.fm

Here at SpinVox HQ, we’re a big fan of “Speaking Freely”, (you may’ve noticed), and with Ping.fm (say it), allowing you to update like, a MILLION places in one go… Speaking Freely TO EVERYONE kinda resonates nicely, (should that be ‘Ping Freely’ ? – Heh).

Taking that thought and expanding upon it, wouldn’t it be just a little bit cool if you could Ping… through SpinVox?

Well, now you can. If you’re a Ping.fm user already get yourself along to the SpinVox page, add your details, dial the number.. and start saying it with Ping through SpinVox!

…if you’re NOT a Ping.fm user, what are you doing!? Sign up now!

BTW – For the more cynically minded of you out there, you’re probably wondering where this leaves our current Social Networks through SpinVox service…
Y’know, surely setting up this Ping.fm integration means we’re kinda in competition with ourselves right?

WRONG.

SpinVox converts Voice into Text. It’s what we do. Enabling this for Ping.fm users just makes sense.

SpinVox this, SpinVox that, SpinVox coming out my EARS!

No really, there’s just SO MUCH that has been going while I’ve been away it’s actually quite insane…

Now, I’m not one for regurgitating press releases on this ‘ere blog of ours, (I mean that’s why we have a press section, right?), but some things, sometimes, are just too big to ignore – so just indulge me for a minute will you? Cool.

First off, as I plough through the mountain of emails in my overloaded inbox… Charlie Engle!

Who?!

CHARLIE ENGLE!
(clue – that’s him down there)

Here’s a guy who, along with his running mate Marshall Ullrich, has decided he’s going to run across America. That’s right – I said RUN across AMERICA!

From New York to San Francisco to be precise.

Yeah huh. Let’s just take a moment to digest that.

Running. Across AMERICA. …and a record attempt to boot!

“Engle will attempt to break the record for fastest run from San Francisco to New York. He aims to run 3,200 miles within 45 days, averaging more than 70 miles per day.”

Now look I’m all for these hardcore nutters achieving amazing sporting feats and stuff, but this is just simply ridiculous! How is anyone REALLY, supposed to compete with this…?!
OK OK OK, I’ll stop having a moan…

Back to the point; Why am I mentioning this? From the picture above you can see that Mr Engle here is on the phone while RUNNING (ok ok – we’ve established the whole running thing now dude), but he’s not phoning home, or checking with his Mum… Oh no. The man is BLOGGING! Oh yes. You’re way ahead of me now aren’t you. The dude is blogging through SpinVox. Uh huh. That’s right.

His latest voice post goes something like this:

“Exciting news for Marshall. Marshall has completed 1015 miles. Over a 1000 miles. Over 1000 miles. That’s a lot of time on his feet. But it means he’s 1/3 done with running America. Thanks for checking in. Keep sending thoughts and prayers.”

I don’t know about you, but I think this is awesome.

Their blog is being updated daily and if you’re interested in following their journey as they RUN ACROSS AMERICA then I suggest you jump over and check it out.

Good luck guys – we’re rootin’ for ya!

More to follow tomorrow…

Yes – that’s right, you heard me – and it’s as simple as making a phone call!

Basically all you have to do is call 0151 266 8283 (UK only) and tell us which accents you love (or hate) the most and why. Your message will then be posted directly to the brand new (and quite sexy) Moblog site -

We Love Your Accent

The best caller will win a brand-spanking new Nokia N82!
ROCK!

To be honest – that alone is a pretty awesome prize -but wait there’s more…

We’re also throwing in a year’s free subscription to both SpinVox and Moblog!

Yep. That’s right… MORE FREE STUFF!

What?! What’s that?
You want MORE?!

OK OK OK!

How about we chuck in 250 Moo cards too huh? Would that suit?!
Yeah?!

YEAH!

Awesomeness – Great prizes for a GREAT Competition – How’s that for a slice of fried gold?

That’s pretty much all you need -  but just in case – I grabbed the press release for you too – have a look see…

______________________________________________________________________________

Speech is one of humanity’s greatest gifts – but it has now been revealed that almost three quarters (73 per cent) of people in Britain don’t like the sound of their own voices.

Given the chance to change the way they talk, most Brits would prefer to sound like the Queen, whilst only one in twenty would like to speak Cockney.

The problem is at its worst in Birmingham. Brum, made famous world-wide by foul mouthed Ozzy Ozbourne, not only tops the league of regions where people dislike their own accents, it is also bottom of the league of voices other Brits would like to exchange for their own. Only one per cent of Brits would choose to speak like a Brummy.

Said Tony Robinson, SpinVox linguistic expert: “It seems Britain is being gripped by an epidemic of Accent Envy and Accent Self Loathing. After decades where dialect diversity has been celebrated, the majority of Brits now aspire to Received Pronunciation (RP) and to share the sound of their voice not only with The Queen but with celebs like Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant.”

A poll* of more than 2,000 people around Great Britain, by voice-to-content company SpinVox, found that after the Queen’s accent, most Brits would choose an Irish accent, followed by Scottish.

When it comes to who actually does like the sound of their own voice, the Scots, Geordies and Welsh take the podium positions.

Overall the Queen’s English is the most popular accent in Great Britain.

Tony Robinson continued: “Accents are intricately tied into our own sense of identity. It’s interesting that those with distinct cultural or class identities are more satisfied with the way they speak and it’s precisely those accents that the rest of us want to acquire. The fact is that English as spoken in the UK is incredibly dynamic, precisely because of the regional variations in the way we speak – we are still seeing new words being added to our D2 system’s dictionary at the rate of thousands a week 70% of those words are not even contained in published English Dictionaries.”

Tell us your favourite accent and win!
We’d love to know what your favourite accent is and why, just call 01512668283 and tell us in under 2 minutes and our favourite call-in wins a Nokia N82, a years free subscription to Moblog, a one year free trial of the Spinvox voicemail service, and 250 free Moo cards of their choice!

Visit http://lovetheaccent.com to listen to the nations favourite accents and add your own.

http://lovetheaccent.com is powered by the mobile blogging site Moblog. Moblog lets you easily upload and share images and videos you record on your mobile phone, and even keep a voice blog using SpinVox.

`Voice-to-Content`, the process of automatically converting the spoken word into the written word is one of the fastest-growing telecommunications trends of 2008. In less than two years, SpinVox has converted over 50 million voice messages in four languages and on four continents, delivering them as SMS texts, emails, blogs or posts on social network walls and spaces.

GET CALLING!

Over the weekend, one Michael Arrington, (Hello Mike), wrote a post entitled ‘Think before you Voicemail‘.

Mike can be a tad ‘controversial’ sometimes, having an opening gambit like “Voicemail is dead” is bound to ruffle a few feathers… and of course, it did.

As predicted, Sir Mike of Arrington has sparked quite a large and heated debate. At the time of writing, the original article has nearly 200 comments and also has prompted some fantastic responses.

“Think before you Voicemail” is an interesting notion, I say “Think before you SpinVox” is a better one.

Allow me to explain…

Whenever I call anyone with a ‘traditional’ voicemail box (voicemail 1.0 if you will, natch) I certainly think about what I’m going to say – most of the time, if I’m honest, I hang up.
If I continue, normally the first thing out of my mouth is something along the lines of “Dude, first of all: Get SpinVox…” with the second point being something like “…oh, and call me back”.

However, when I encounter a SpinVox enabled voicemail box I *definitely* have a good think. As soon as I hear those wonderful words “SpinVox will convert your voice into text” I KNOW right there and then that the person I’m trying to reach WILL get my message. Therefore a simple “Call me back” becomes redundant – how about leaving a full message with all the facts in? With the confidence of delivery!

A good example of this is a few weeks ago, I stepped off the tube in town and this SpinVox/Voicemail arrived:

I SMS’d Jonathan straight back -”Diary is empty on Thursday, I’ll be there.”
Job done – (that’s me on the right)

I digress…

Voicemail is not dead.
Voicemail is alive.
You just need to know how to use it.

The only thing you should “Think before you Voicemail” is:

“Why doesn’t this guy have SpinVox?!”

____________________

Oh and one final thing: Mike says ‘It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it’.

That’s something we’ve talked about before (over The Future of Voice actually), but dig a little deeper and there are some hard facts out there that back this up:

It is actually SEVEN TIMES quicker to read than to listen.

However it is also seven times quicker to speak than to type, so speaking someone an email for example? That’s a good idea. Oh hang on – they’ve got SpinVox – you already can!

Of the 360 BILLION voicemails (minimum) left every year, a staggering 20% of them go unlistened to. Combine that with the fact that your average voicemail can lose 50% of its value after a mere 45mins, the case for SpinVox becomes increasingly valuable.

So a message to Mike, from all of us at SpinVox: Voicemail has evolved. Come join the party.

Nicole Scott of BnetTV gives us her take on voice-to-text, with some awesome demos too:

Nice one Nicole!

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!

Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList

Still recovering from the madness that was CTIA in Las Vegas, (more pics and stuff to come later today), can you imagine how happy I was to wake up this morning to an email from friend of SpinVox and all round nice chap, Neil Bird, from iGadgetlife.com:

“Dude! Gadget Show! SpinVox! AWESOMENESS!“

Well – something like that anyway…

Anywhoo, Neil (the absolute star!) not only recorded the whole thing on his Sky+ (it’s the UK version of TiVo) but also uploaded it to the web for the whole world to behold!

Cheers Neil… And of course, HUGE thanks to The Gadget Show!

I don’t know – last week Radio, this week Television… Next week: The Internet!…no, wait!

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!

Way back when SpinVox was in Barcelona. I met a lovely chap called Jeremiah.
Goes by the name of ‘Pseudofinn’ online, (Google him – you’ll see).

Anyway, we had a chat about all things mobile-related and eventually we got onto the subject of SpinVox.

“Voice to text?! Eh?“

Well ‘Pseudofinn’ finally went and signed up a couple of weeks ago and now?

It seems he is “Simply Smitten with SpinVox“. Not only that but he also think it’s “ultra-cool“ too!

You can read why he feels this way over on his website – www.nokiausers.net

And if you like what he’s done there – you should definitely check out the Flickr Group he set up called:

“Speech Mobsters on the March Around the Globe!“

If you’ve got a SpinVox Speech Mobster, why not take a photo and add it to the group – (we have)
Some of the entries can be seen on the left column of this blog – under Mobster Pics – or you can click through and see the whole lot yourself.

I’ll be back later with some more link love…

Dr Tony Robinson, director of the cambridge-based SpinVox Advanced Speech Group (ASG) was on the BBC the other day demonstrating how SpinVox works and how the ASG assist in ‘Teaching the Speech Machine’.

If you interested, you can read the whole article over on the BBC or you can just watch the video below

Enjoy!

Oh and by the way, what do you think of the new look? S’nice innit? I like it.

What do you think?

Leave a comment below or simply call 0151 2666 149 to speak freely directly to the blog!