Spinvox has been a big favourite of tech fans in the past couple of years. Turning garbled voicemail into readable texts is supposed to mean no more whacking your mobile’s volume up and employing your best translation skills on your pals’ drunken ramblings. But now a BBC investigation has found Spinvox to be using call centres rather than clever tech to transcribe calls, with some data even ending up on Facebook.
Auntie has found that Spinvox’s “Voice Message Conversion System”, which apparently, “learns all the time about how we speak,” is actually heavily reliant on regular folks listening to your witterings. They then transcribe them in call centres in South Africa and the Philippines.
While Spinvox has said this does happen occasionally, one staffer in an Egyptian call centre claimed, “The machine doesn’t understand anything,” and that they were doing all the transcribing.
Worse still are reports that a Facebook group for Egyptian staff who used to work at the centre contained sensitive information including audio recordings and commercial chatter.
Spinvox reckons this centre never handled live calls, but the staff say differently. And pencil pushers in Brussels may have something to say about that too. Spinvox may have broken stringent data protection laws by using staff outside the EU.
Not only does it seem Spinvox’s much–vaunted tech isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, it looks like it’s in deep trouble with the powers that be too.
