CORRECTION: I'm a victim of SpinVox Spin - Sorry!

As some eagle eyed readers of Mobile Industry Review have spotted, my previous post entitled, ‘SpinVox claims only 2% of messages are referred to humans” was incorrect.

I read their press release (included in the previous post) and centred on this paragraph:

“This process has helped us improve our accuracy massively. Since its inception in 2007, the technology has improved to the extent that the system requires only two per cent of the input it required just two years ago and can even now predict more than 99 per cent of what most people speaking in English or Spanish will say next. Or to put it another way, in just two years, we have reduced the requirement for human intervention to just a few hundred agents per market compared to the thousands per market when we started. Our world-class speech scientists in the Advanced Speech Group have helped make this system unchallenged in terms of accuracy, speed and reliability.”

My immediate takeaway? Only 2% of their messages are referred to humans.

‘Finally,’ I thought, ‘We can get on with our lives and stop having to wonder about the SpinVox technology.’

2% is good enough, right?

Well, yes.

But I think I was willing this to be the case. I wonder how you read that paragraph? A lot better than I did in the cold light of day I’m sure.

It turns out I got it wholly wrong as this anonymous poster rightly asserts in the initial article comments:

“The system requires only two per cent of the input it required just two years ago”

That’s not the same as “only 2% of messages are referred to humans”

Sorry to be a pedant, but there are lies, damned lies and statistics!!

Ed Lea joined the discussion thus:

“Since its inception in 2007, the technology has improved to the extent that the system requires only two per cent of the input it required just two years ago.”

That’s certainly 2% of something, but I’m not sure what. There are a lot of different numbers and stats in that their statement but it feels like there’s a bit of smoke and a few mirrors left.

PR expert Patrick Smith contributed:

Actually, after reading the release again, they still don’t actually state how many messages are done by computers or humans, or a bit of both. What they state is they need 98% less human interaction – which isn’t quite the same as 2% of messages done by humans.

So, even after all this, they’re trying to hide behind ‘clever’ PR.

Why can’t they just be up front and honest?

Kieran wasn’t impressed:

SPINvox, I honestly don’t think people would mind if they were more honest and less Spin

Ewan Spence then demonstrates my plonker status thus:

Hold on a mo, still think you;re being spun here

” the system requires only two per cent of the input it required just two years ago ”

Let’s be evil. Let’s try and work out how many MESSAGES this is. ie how BIG can the number be. First up, lets say at the start ALL messages had to go to humans. 100%. So that means now tha tthe input required is two percent of the workload. Okay, imagining a sample of 1000 SMS messages,each filling 160 characters. That’s 160,000 letters, so taking an average of 5 letters per word (good rule of thumb in code breaking) that’s 32,000 words

So in year X, 32,000 of 32,000 words are checked by humans.

Now, in year X+2, 32000/50 only 640 words need checked. But how many messages does that represent? Well if the 160 SMS long messages contain, on average 32 words, then our batch of 1000 messages with an equal spread has one wrong word in two thirds of the messages, and that means we could be lookign at an upper limit of 66% of messages requiring human intervention.

That’s a far cry from the PR spin attempt at 2%

…and I’m not even a statistician!

Thank you chaps for your contributions and for helping clarify that my original post wasn’t accurate. I’ve updated the headline accordingly and drafted this one to go out across the social media wires quickly to replace the old one.

As for SpinVox, goodness me, I’ll need to read their statements a lot more carefully next time.

Can I get a non-slippy, non-hidden, non-verbal-reasoning-test answer to the following question, please, SpinVox?

How many messages are referred — in any way — to human operators during the transcription process?

It’s great that you need 98% less human interaction. But I don’t know what that means. Maybe humans needed to listen to the entire message and transcribe everything when they launched? Now they only need to listen to parts of the message or phrases? I don’t know.