SpinVox raises a ton
SpinVox, the company that turns your voice message to text, has raised $100 million in funding. I just can’t get over it. This has got to be one of the biggest rounds of funding that a Voice 2.0 company has secured so far. The first time I stumbled upon the ambitious SpinVox was about a year ago when I was looking for a tool to automatically blog a transcribed version of my voice. Admittedly I could only find SpinVox capable of doing the job well.
The company has pre-integrated its application with Twitter and Jaiku micro blogs. It is also pre-integrated with conventional blogging tools like Blogger and Live Journal. SpinVox does not disclose the number of bloggers that are using its capability. But anyway, that is not what the $100 million is for.
SpinVox has been a roaring success with the carriers, which is the main source of its income. The 12 carriers that it has signed up so far gives the company an addressable market of over 100 million subscriber accounts just among those 12. Among the 12 are Telstra, Telus, and Alltel. I have had doubts about the accuracy of speech-to-text capabilities of such offerings out there. But SpinVox says its carrier customers are reporting almost 97% conversion accuracy on average across a range of accents in the four languages that it supports.
SpinVox will use the funds to drive carrier sales and setup the requisite infrastructure under a managed services model. The company is expecting to double the number of carrier customers by the end of 2008. Apparently it has also found a way to monetize its application on social networks but is not revealing any information on the subject just yet. Right now the service offered direct to consumers or bloggers or social network users serves to demonstrate the product according to SpinVox.
SpinVox will also be exploring the enterprise space leveraging unified communications platforms.
