SpinVox carcass laid bare in final accounts

Dragon's Den TV star Julie Meyer described SpinVox as "the first major technology success story out of Europe", but the company's final accounts show a business running at a huge loss, spending heavily, and with interest payments alone exceeding income.

The accounts also show that CEO Christine Domecq repaid the company a six figure sum.

Speech giant Nuance acquired the controversial British company - which dominated the business pages last summer - shortly before Christmas in a stock deal.

Although its executives bravely talked of an IPO, SpinVox's liabilities far exceeded its assets. The company listed current liabilities of £124m, including trade and other payables of £59.6m and borrowings of £64.3m.

Yet SpinVox booked just £7.8m in revenue for the nine months year ending 30 September 2009, reporting a staggering loss of £56.49m. In the nine months ending 30 September 2008, accounts reveal, the company posted a £45.25m loss on income of just £2.97m.

The cost of doing business was high, with SpinVox buying customers. In June, the company announced a deal with Telefonica to provide text-to-speech voicemail in 13 Latin American countries.

The accounts refer to an "intangible asset of £22.2m, in respect of the right to provide its service to a customer". This was to be amortized over the term of the deal. But the accounts added that "since the contract is at an early stage of deployment, management consider it reasonably possible that the net revenue under the contract may be zero".

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Spinvox bought by Nuance for £64m

UK firm Spinvox, which converts voicemails into texts, has been bought by speech recognition company Nuance for $102.5m (£64m).

The deal is worth $66m in cash and $36.5m in stock, about a third of the previously rumoured $146m price tag.

Spinvox investor Invesco Perpetual had confirmed in September that Spinvox was up for sale.

In recent months doubts had been cast on how effective Spinvox's speech-to-text software actually was.

The company claims to use advanced voice recognition software for its service, but the BBC found that human operators were also involved in transcribing many messages.

SpinVox Recognized as Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum

SpinVox, a vendor of voice-to-content messaging, has been named one of the world’s most innovative technology companies by the World Economic Forum, capping a year in which 13 telecommunications carriers around the world launched the SpinVox service. [click heading for more]

SpinVox raises $100 million from Goldman, others

SpinVox, which converts voicemail messages into text and sends them to a recipient's inbox or phone, has raised more than $100 million in funding from a Goldman Sachs Group Inc unit and other institutional investors, the company said on Wednesday.
This third round of funding values London-based SpinVox "in excess of $500 million," co-founder and Chief Executive Christina Domecq said in an interview.
SpinVox plans to use the money to expand its presence in North America and introduce voice-to-text services in more languages, she said.
SpinVox has deals with 12 cell phone carriers globally, including Canada's Rogers Mobile and Alltel Wireless, the fifth-largest U.S. carrier, and plans to double that number this year. [click heading for more]

Alltel to convert voice to text messages

The mobile company is using voice recognition software, much like that used in automated 411 lines and telephone bank services, with the aim being to provide a hands-free method of texting. Alltel's Voice2TXT service will utilize technology by British company Spinvox , and will provide users with the option to have voice mails sent to them as text messages. [click heading for more]

Has voice recognition finally come of age?

It is a bold person who would dictate a message to anywhere public, such as a blog, without editing it first. But one area where speech recognition is very useful is dictating notes to yourself to remind you of things to do, or simply recording those random yet pertinent thoughts that occur to you during the day that might otherwise be forgotten. That would certainly change my life for the better.
I have been testing two products recently that enable you to ring a number, dictate a short message into a mobile phone and have the result emailed to you later so you don't forget. [click heading for more]

Voice mail re-emerges with a new relevance as text or e-mail

With the rise of e-mail and instant text messaging, the communications workhorse of the past 30 years - voice mail - is finding itself increasingly unloved and avoided.
But new speech-recognition and transcription services are laying the foundation for a revival of voice mail, helping it become as immediate, manageable and storable as its text counterparts. Companies like SpinVox, SimulScribe and CallWave are connecting traditional voice mail in-boxes to back-end servers that analyze and transcribe messages before returning them to users within minutes in the form of text messages or e-mails. [click heading for more]

SpinVox Teams Up with Social Networking Sites to Enable Speech-to-Text Blogging

SpinVox has brought speech-to-text to a new level with its new Voice-to-Screen speech-to-text messaging client. With this service, you can dictate a message to be sent to friends or colleagues via Web chat or SMS or email and send it off with just a click. The real news is the company has announced deals with social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and Jaiku which enable users to post messages on their pages simply by talking into their mobile devices. This will be of particular interest to bloggers who wish to blog while “on the road”. The company claims presidential hopeful John Edwards has been using Twitter to communicate with his staff whilst on the campaign trail using its voice to screen technology. [click heading for more]