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Online Journalism News

The newsgathering potential of voice-to-text conversion service SpinVox

Posted: 04/12/07 By: Laura Oliver
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A technology that first found the light of day as a neat device for converting voicemail to an email could improve searches for online video content and become an important tool for news providers, developers claim.

Voice-to-text service SpinVox converts speech to text using an automated speech recognition system.

Simon Crowfoot, the company's strategic business development director told Journalism.co.uk that voicemail was just one of a range of applications for the technology.

SpinVox, he said, could be used to make video and audio clips more easily searchable by detailing the words contained in the audio rather than relying on tags and titles assigned by publishers.

"Hypothetically you could go to YouTube and say, show me all the clips containing the word London, and it would bring up not just the clips that have London in the title or tags, but those where it's contained in the audio itself," explained Crowfoot.

Users would then avoid the 'cumbersome process' of sifting through search results produced by tag words.

That's not the only use, Crowfoot added, the technology has a plethora of applications that could make it 'a very powerful tool in the news business'.

It already boasts an application for blogs that works by converting voice to text, which then can automatically update posts and comments through emailing the content directly onto the web page.

The application was named best new service at last week's World Communication Awards in London and is already used by TimesOnline's travel blogging section.

It wouldn't take a huge step, Crowfoot added, for more correspondents to post content directly online or file text stories to a backend content system for editing in situations where they have no internet access.

He added that the blogging service lends itself to live coverage of events and the involvement of non-professional journalists because of the immediacy of speech as opposed to typing.

"The ability for citizens to ring up and express what's going on - that news story in the moment - is a very powerful thing," he said.

"It [SpinVox] could be a very cheap and simple way of gathering local news from the people without having call centres full of people answering phones."

All great ideas, but the technology has yet to be used all that widely in a news context and remains as an untested, if interesting prospect.

Despite the development of its applications for media groups, Crowfoot said that SpinVox’s service for converting mobile phone voicemails would remain its core business.

However, he added, that over the last year the company had been developing partnerships with media companies and broadcasters to apply SpinVox's existing technology in these new ways.

"A lot of the ideas come from people approaching us and saying, can you do this, and we say, of course we can. It [SpinVox] is unlike anything that's really ever existed in this space before."

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digital video | blogging | spinvox | simon crowfoot |