SpinVox was a great concept in principle: phone a number and speak your message which then gets translated and sent as SMS to your recipient.

Spin-my-Blog was based on a similar idea, except (wouldn’t you know it) it posted the resultant text to your blog.

Standards have been slipping of late, though, which led many to believe that the initial promise of highly intelligent supercomputers automagically translating your text weren’t quite as accurate as stated by the company.

That’s not to say they weren’t trying, but when you get Egyptian call center staff telling the BBC they’re hacked off with the whole deal, and then you see some of the laughable translations being sent back (after the computers have failed and the humans have had a go) you do wonder how scalable the whole thing is. [Read more…]

Originally posted on July 24, 2009 @ 7:55 am