Do kids still play the game “telephone” with two tin cans and a length of string? Maybe not, given the way telephony has changed. Here’s another twist…
SpinVox converts spoken phone messages into text and delivers them to a screen.
Christina Domecq’s burgeoning voice mail was the impetus for UK-based SpinVox. Rather 
than listen to voice mails over and over to capture important information, she wanted to convert them to text. She teamed up with Daniel Doulton to develop the “voice-to-screen” idea.
Wow.
The voice-mail to text service, Spin-my-Vmail™ has a free 7 day trial period and then goes to subscription rates. You can play with demos of some of the other SpinVox services to see how they work. Spin-my-Memo™ allows you to speak “reminders, memos and notes into your phone, wherever you are, and SpinVox will send them directly to your email inbox.” Spin-my-Broadcast™ is a service for broadcasting SMS text messages to groups of people from a single spoken phone message.
With SpinVox’s Spin-My-Blog™ you can speak a short message into your phone and it will be posted to your blog. I tried out the demo, and got a text message on my cell phone that said
“Hi! For your message ‘Info dudad(?) is the next thing blog’ check on-screen at blog.spinvox.com”
The post didn’t appear on the blog, so I’m guessing I “sounded” like spam. I think I actually said something like “Infodoodads is an exciting new blog, ” but hey, I mumble — and infodoodads is a made-up word. Try it yourself using good enunciation and real words.
Oh, and one more thing– if you use the Spongecell calendar you can speak a calendar entry and it will appear as an event. You’ll also get a text message reminder from the Spongecell before the event.
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Interesting! If this technology works well, it means that government agencies can use it to keep better public records of voice mail, and publicly funded companies can use it to keep better records for financial reporting purposes. I wonder if anyone will make us do it? On the paranoid tip, the FBI would no longer need to sit in a van listening to our conversations, they could simply translate them to text and get an alarm when certain keywords appear.
-and then they’ll tattoo an ID on our foreheads at birth, and use our genetic profile to determine who gets the top government jobs… Yes, while all of these scenarios _could_ happen and should be thoughtfully considered, I think that there’s a balance that can be achieved between living in fear and experiencing new technological possibilities.
My motto for the day - be smart, but don’t be afraid!