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!

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.

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

SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX.

Want more?!

Ok, what about if I get the Mobsters involved too? How’s this?

Hehehehehe….   So, why the SEX talk?

Well. A few months ago I was taken along to a meeting with some of the people behind MTV’s Staying Alive Foundation. The Staying Alive Founation (SAF) is a global charity setup by MTV to empower and support young people who are protecting themselves from HIV and AIDS.

The meeting was organised to discuss how Social Media could be used to help people across the world connect over the issues surrounding sex today. “Wow!” was my initial response “What a brief?!”

Sex in society today has a stigma attached to it which means it can be embarrassing to talk about openly. Something as simple as buying a pack of condoms from a pharmacist to some can be the hardest thing in the world. This needs to stop.

The Staying Alive Foundation believe that the best way to combat such pressure is to encourage conversation. Conversation is education. Only by truly keeping discussions about sex firmly out in the open can we ever hope to relieve the parameters that seem to fence young people when it comes to this subject matter.

So what can you do to help?

SpinVox & ‘U’ see - clever huh?

You can start by stimulating conversation around some of the points and issues that I’ve outlined above. Moreover, the Staying Alive Foundation needs YOU to be vocal in your support.

It needs YOU to GIVE VOICE TO THIS CAUSE.

Today SpinVox launched its first ever Social Responsibility Campaign - it’s called “Stand By What You Say“

Its in partnership with Staying Alive, you can donate through Facebook Causes, Kelly Rowland is voicing the campaign (call the numbers and see) and YOU can get involved by heading over to the website right now and speaking freely about SEX.

More info:

The joint SpinVox/Staying Alive Press Release
More about Staying Alive
And of course, some fun pictures on Flickr

The numbers you can call on are below, call and Speak Freely about the sexual issues you want to address:
Your message will appear on http://www.standbywhatyousay.com

United Kingdom +44 151 266 7700

Ireland +3531 657 1891

USA +1513 729 6417

Canada +1416 628 8501

Spain +3493 184 2078

France +3317 666 0863

Germany +4921 1237 061072

Call, leave your message and remember - “Stand By What You Say“

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]]> http://blog.spinvox.com/2008/05/20/nom-nom-nom-whats-it-all-about-then/feed/ http://blog.spinvox.com/2008/05/13/nom-nom-nom-in-pursuit-of-fruit/ http://blog.spinvox.com/2008/05/13/nom-nom-nom-in-pursuit-of-fruit/#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 18:30:38 +0000 jwhatley http://blog.spinvox.com/?p=59 del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | [...]]]> There’s something up in the SpinVox Kitchen and the Mobsters want in…

What are they are up to?

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!

But elsewhere in London the big question really was ‘Who’s it going to be, Boris or Ken?’

By the time you read this, you’ll probably already know the answer - but that didn’t stop our Speech Mobsters hijacking a London Black Cab for the day and spreading the SpinVox love around the electorate…

More on what happened at The Future of Voice after the weekend - In the meantime however, have a great Bank Holiday Weekend…

…and Enjoy!

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!

…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…