Thursday, July 23, 2009

Jott Competitor Under The Microscope

A competitor of Seattle-based Jott, UK-based SpinVox, is fighting a controversy that the firm's voice messaging and transcription service does not use speech recognition technology at all, but in fact, simply uses low cost overseas employees to manually transcribe the messages being sent to its service. Jott was acquired last week by speech recognition technology firm Nuance Communications, which is one of the leading providers of speech recognition products. Similarly to SpinVox, Jott had said it used a combination of both machine and human translators in its product, but made no secret that transcriptions usually required human assistance.