Beleagured voice-transcription company Spinvox has responded to criticisms, claiming its technology works as claimed, and the company does not break customers’ privacy.
Spinvox said its speech system outperforms rivals on “accuracy, speed, scale, reliability and language range” and denied that the majority of messages are transcribed by people in call centres in South Africa and the Philippines. It has always been upfront that humans are involved, but the statement revealed that they are bound into the Spinvox system more tightly than its rivals.
All speech recognition systems use humans for training, to correct and inspect the eventual output, but Spinvox claims to go one further with “live-learning”. Its system, known as VMCS, D2 or “the Brain” actually calls for help, said a Spinvox statement: “One of the key technology breakthroughs applied within VMCS enables it to ‘know what it doesn’t know’. VMCS can then refer a message to a human for assistance as required.”
“Other speech systems do [checking] in off-line mode using humans to inspect inputs and outputs, SpinVox does not,” said the statement. The company did not respond directly to the BBC’s assertion that one message was transcribed five very different ways – something which would suggest the process has a very extensive human input.
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