Speech to text messaging system boosting revenues, co-founder claims
SpinVox co-founder Daniel Doulton has told Mobile Europe that he expects the company to have over 20 carrier customers by the end of this year for its speech to text messaging services.
SpinVox, a provider of services that range from delivering voicemail messages as text to allowing bloggers to post directly to their site by speaking into any phone, currently has 14 carrier deals globally. In Europe it provides services to Vodafone UK and Vodafone Spain.
But it claims its positive impact on operator ARPU and call completion is making it favourite to close another dozen operator deals this year. Doulton said that when the new carriers are all on board, he would expect to have 30 million SpinVox users within SpinVox’s carrier customers within a further year. Given the carrier’s 12 operator customers currently give it access to 100 million subscribers, that’s quite a bullish take rate.
Previously, the company operated a D2C model, giving it experience in building up both the core technology – SpinVox now operators its own voice recognition technology development business – as well as understanding of marketing and customer price points, Doulton said,
Doulton claimed to Mobile Europe that operators that have deployed the service have seen overall traffic rise 7%, and text or email traffic rise 17%. Revenues in voicemail alone have risen 100%, Doulton claimed. The services generate enough business to place SpinVox within the top ten vendors at six of its current customers, Doulton said.
Doulton said that even when the product is zero rated (ie earns no actual revenue from a subscriber) it created a business case for operators in terms of customer retention and user satisfaction.
“For call completion and call continuity alone, SpinVox is better than anything else they have today,” Doulton said. “We see fantastic retention of our product because once people start to use it, they don’t want to see it turned off.”
SpinVox recently raised a further $100 million round of funding, bringing its investment to date to $200 million. This investment will give the company the advantage as other speech-to-voice companies, such as Nuance and Kirusa, enter the space.
“It’s about more than technology,” Doulton said, “it’s about having the knowledge and experience to create services and deliver them. We also have years of data that we can apply to the voice recognition algorithms we have, and an algorithm is really only useful in the context of the date you can place it in. What we have is a system, not a technology.”
Doulton said he expected to see SpinVox retain its branding position for the service, with messages being delivered carrying the SpinVox tagline. In time, as the company introduces its next generation “client based” product, then the company would also be looking for real estate on handset menus themselves, he added.