Well… Ok.

Maybe not THE Amy Winehouse.

;D

But still, it’s good to see the SpinVox Speech Mobsters on the move at Glastonbury again, do you remember seeing them there last year?

Thanks for the photos Matt, we love them.

TeamSpinvox from http://spinvoxadventurers.vox.com/

The RAAM - aka ‘The Race Across America‘ - is known as “THE WORLD’S TOUGHEST BIKE RACE” and they are not kidding!

This year’s event, the 28th in it’s history so far, brough together 50 solo and team riders to cycle the grueling 3,000 mile ride from California to Maryland. Our glorious leader, Christina Domecq - along her racing partner, Ian Rolls - set off on this epic journey a little over eight days ago… and today? They finished!

Not only that, but with an average speed of 15.67mph Christina and Ian came first in the mixed doubles division.

Obviously, being awesome SpinVox evangelists en route - they blogged the whole thing on the move, the latest post reads a little something like this:

“We set our sights on conquering RAAM this year and we did it! In the last week we have ridden 3,021 miles across 14 states and 53 cities – a true testament to the achievement that is possible through fortitude, commitment and the power of a strong, dedicated team. We will carry with us many memories from our time riding across America – from the challenges such as the soaring climbs, fast flats, scorching temperatures, bike spills, and rain - to the incredibly inspiring encounters we have had with the other riders and teams and the fantastic warmth and generosity of spirit of the communities we rode through. But the biggest take away from this experience will be the wonderful opportunity to have achieved the seemingly impossible– they don’t call it the world’s toughest bike race for nothing! – with a team in which we all truly believe anything is possible if you put your mind to it. And if you continue to set your sights higher and higher you can really surprise yourself with what you are able to achieve!

Many thanks to all of our supporters throughout the race, your well wishes were greatly appreciated! And, thanks too to our crew who kept each day running smoothly, and to the RAAM organizers for putting on such a well-managed event.

For those wanting to get a glimpse into what the last eight days have been like for the SpinVox Adventurers, stay tuned to this site in the coming days for behind-the-scenes and on-the-road photos. You won’t want to miss these!”

I think I can speak for all of us when I say: “Congratulations SpinVox Adventurers - Well Done!”

You can read the rest of the Adventure - spoken through SpinVox - over on SpinVox Adventurers.

I’m just going to cycle to the shops, I may be some time…

Count the arrows. Go on, count them!

1, 2, 3… Keep counting… 11, 12, 13. Yup. That’s right THIRTEEN countries in Latin America.

Today, at long last, SpinVox can proudly announce that we are deploying as a network service across ALL of Telefonica’s customer base for the ENTIRE region!

That’s right, SpinVox is rolling out in… *Drum Roll Please*

Argentina; Colombia; Ecuador; El Salvador; Guatemala; Mexico; Nicaragua; Panama; Peru; Uruguay and Venezuela will offer the service as will Vivo, Telefónica’s joint venture with Portugal Telecom in Brazil.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand breathe.

Without sounding like we’re blowing our on trumpets or anything but… this deal is HUGE. Landmark even.
It’s the kind of deal that demonstrates the sort of Tier 1 Carrier-grade capability that only SpinVox can provide and that really is something worth writing home about.

Gazillions of users. Gazillions I tell you!

COME ON!

We’ve talked about this before but, what with our recent press release around the uptake we’ve seen in Tweets being spoken through SpinVox I thought I’d add another quick ‘How to’ guide to our blogging collection on how to speak your updates to twitter…

This is open to anyone in the UK, Canada or the US - ready?

Step 1) Get yourself to http://ping.fm/signup/spinvox
Hint: It looks like this:

Step 2) Go through the oh so simple (five step) signup process.
(not forgetting to add Twitter to your dashboard)

Step 3) Dial the number you get given at the end and then you’re ready to…  PING THROUGH SPINVOX!

It’s that easy, a monkey could do it

Give it a go, you might like the results…

In the first of what will no doubt eventually turn out to be many, many Twitter related SpinVox blog posts - today I want to talk about language.
More specifically, Twitter language.

See SpinVox has this thing called a ‘Voxgeist’, which is basically a list of words that are being uttered right now. Words of the moment if you will. We can use this (and have been using this) to monitor trends, spot regional patterns and most interestingly, detect new words and phrases in around certain areas of interest.

The past few weeks I’ve been helping out on the lookout for new words that have slowly crept into the Voxgeist in around all things Twitter. What with our Ping.fm integration gaining new users week on week, it was only a matter of time before we started seeing super random words and phrases pop up in our virtual lexicon.

Here’s ten of the best:

1. Hashtag (noun): a way of marking an event or common theme e.g. “I’m off to Mobile Geeks of London #MGoL” (also - see #FollowFriday)

2. #FollowFriday (term): a weekly event, where you recommend your favourite Twitterers to your followers.

3. Dabr (noun): a mobile web interface for Twitter.

4. Twetiquette (term): appropriate behavior when using Twitter.

5. Twitpoll (noun): a survey/question posed on Twitter, often for research. Sometimes just for fun: e.g.: “Which shoes should I buy?”

6. Tweetdeck (noun): one of the most popular desktop interfaces for Twitter.

7. Twhirl (noun): a smaller, less intrusive desktop interface for Twitter

8. Mashable Effect (term): the result of @mashable, aka Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable.com, re-tweeting your site/blog address and causing it to overload with web traffic.

9. Tweetup (noun): a meeting organised on Twitter.

10. Twestival (noun): a charity event organised using Twitter

Obviously I can’t let this blog post go by without a blatant plug of our Ping through SpinVox service…  Sign up is easy and, once complete, you can speak your tweets freely from wherever you have a phone signal!

Last week it seemed we caused quite a stir both in the blogosphere and in some online forumes when we announced that the Sprint-exclusive Palm Pre would be completely compatible with SpinVox Voicemail right out of the box.

As I mentioned in the post, the steps are quite easy - but I’m going to go into them in detail right here, so if you’re reading this and you’ve already PRE-ordered (heh), then bookmark this post now, you’ll need it come June 6th.

Step 1.

If you’re on Sprint* (and not already a SpinVox customer), then first you’ll need to signup for SpinVox Voicemail from our partners, uReach.
uReach will provide you with a 10 digit  Voicemail through SpinVox voicemail number.

Step 2.

From your handset dial *73 and then enter the 10 digit number that UReach provided you with. Press ‘SEND’ and listen for the confirmation tone to indicate the feature has been activated.

PLEASE NOTE:
‘Conditional call forwarding’ needs to be enabled in order for the above codes to work. If you do not have call forwarding enabled then please contact Sprint customer care on 1-877-654-9111. Once connected press ‘5′ for MOBILE INTEGRATION from the IVR. The customer service agent will set you up from there.

Step 3.

That is it. You’re all setup and ready to go. Visible Voicemail for the win

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand…

A prize of stickers + a mini-SpinVox Speech Mobster figure goes to the first person to send me a photo of SpinVox in action on their very own Pre!

The last thing you need to know, and this is very important, the only service SpinVox charges for is SpinVox Voicemail. All other services - including Ping.fm, SpinVox Blog, SpinVox Memo are totally free - or rather, simply the price of a phone call.

*If you’re in the US (or Canada) and not on Sprint, you too can signup to SpinVox Voicemail using the the method above or simply by asking one of our carrier partners, listed below:

US
Alltell $5.99 - Unlimited
Cincinnati Bell $5.99 - Unlimited
Skype $0.25 per conversion

Canada
Rogers $4-$6 Dependent on deal
Telus $7.50 Unlimited or as standard on Pacakge CAD$25 and Smartphone CAD$45

Palm Pre + SpinVox = YES!

The Palm Pre has been a constant source of buzz and news ever since it was first showed off to the blogging world back at CES earlier this year.

So what with the announcement last week that US network Sprint have finally set a release date, the chatter has gone into overdrive over what features and functionality this rather swish little device will arrive with.

Well news is filtering through this morning that the Palm Pre will NOT be shipping with the iPhone-esque ‘Visual Voicemail’ feature that everyone hoped it would.

Both IntoMobile & MobileMag however make the rather intuituve suggestion that the Pre might very well be compatible with SpinVox Voicemail - aka, the far superior* ‘Visible Voicemail‘.

Back in February, at Mobile World Congress, yours truly was given a fantasically in-depth walk through (I took some nice photos), of the handset in question and, as I did back then, I can again - exclusively reveal that the Palm Pre will be *completely* SpinVox ready out of the box.

You simply just have to enter in your usual SpinVox activation code and you’ll be away!

Just like the Treo before it, the Palm Pre is going to be able to use the only voice to text service available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German - with the sophistication to deal with individual accents and regional variations such as US, Canadian, Australian and South African English.

How’s that for a slice of fried gold?

*Don’t just take my word for it, read the comments here  - “Visual vs Visible Voicemail“

It seems that in my absence there has been such a flurry of awesome activities, that it looks like I’m going to be blogging every single day this week!
Bonkers.
Starting off, let’s get groovy with something fresh off the virtual press with SpinVox’s own Dr Tony Robinson making a rather informative appearance on this week’s episode of the BBC’s flashship technology programme; Click.

If you’ve never heard of Dr Tony, well he’s our brain-in-resident over heading up our Advanced Speech Group over in Cambridge.
The man knows his stuff and if you’re still unsure of his uber-creds, jump over to read the full story and find out what else he had to say on ‘A sound start to speech tech‘

With James Whatley away for a week on vacation I, Matt Heath, am blogging in his place. As you’d expect, we’re a hard-working crew of speech to text zealots here at SpinVox Towers but sometimes ever we’re amazed at the reaction we get out there. We’ve just been named as being behind the “most exciting iPhone app update ever” – with two exclamation marks, no less!!

Yep, Dan C at whatsoniphone was first out of the traps to try out the latest version of nFinity’s Quick Voice PRO which has just been released on App Store at 99 cents. Quick Voice PRO is the latest version of the award-winning voice recorder that instantly became a Top 100 product in Apple’s App Store when it was released in July 2008.

What’s special is that, with the new enhancement, Quick Voice PRO users will be able use their iPhones for the first time to record voice messages which will be automatically converted to text by SpinVox and sent to the email inbox of the user’s choice.

The reason is that the folks at nFinity were able to launch this product is that they have been working with SpinVox API which we pre-announced back in February for developer registration and that already has over 400 developers signed up.

Cool, huh? Dan certainly thinks so read him here

Revisiting a topic from early last week, ‘RiddlerMike‘ has just discovered the wonders of SpinVox Memo.
Mike writes:

“I’m having a bit of a slow day today… - …so I took the opportunity of being sat at my desk to try out SpinVox (http://www.spinvox.com) - and put simply, it’s brilliant. I can see so many uses for this (they’re primary ‘business’ is converting your voicemail into text and forwarding it to your mobile, which I can see a stack of uses for), but today was just about playing around with it.”

And play around with it he did…

Why not jump over and see how Mike got on with his experiments?

I did… and I left him a cheeky little SpinVox Hacker tip while I was there too.

Shh..