In some form, at some time, we have all been silenced. We all have felt that our voice had no value, that we were invisible.
Posts Tagged ‘voice’
Voice technology firm hits back
July 24th, 2009 |
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By Rory Cellan-Jones
Technology correspondent, BBC News
Voice-to-text firm Spinvox has reacted to BBC allegations over its technology, finances and privacy standards.
In a blog post on its company website, it described the allegations as "both incorrect and inaccurate".
The BBC has been told that most voice mail calls handled by Spinvox are transcribed by call centre staff, rather than converted automatically.
In the blog post, Spinvox said this was incorrect. "All speech technology requires training," it added.
Humans were used to correct and inspect some audio and text, but it said Spinvox had delivered "world-leading breakthroughs" in speech recognition technology.
Data register
The Buckinghamshire-based company, founded in 2003, also denied that it had broken data protection rules by sending messages out of Europe for transcription.
It said it was permitted to process data outside the European Economic Area and its security systems had the confidence of both customers and investors.
But its entry in the Data Protection Register says there will be no transfers outside Europe.
When the BBC contacted the Information Commissioner’s office again after Spinvox’s statement a spokesman said it would still be writing to the firm about this issue.
It does appear that the company is trying to expand its call centre operations overseas to handle big new contracts in Latin America.
In a recent Spinvox advert on an outsourcing website, the company said it was in need "of some significant support" with voice-to-text transcription services.
It went on to explain that the work involved "a combination of voice to text transcription & quality assurance for some messages that have been automatically converted by our voice recognition platforms."
In its blog the company also denies that it is facing financial problems after staff were asked to take part of their pay in the form of share options.
It says that is an "opportunity" it routinely offers staff, and that it currently operates profitably.
The most recent accounts for Spinvox show that in 2007 it made a loss of £36m on revenue of £2m. The average pay in a workforce of 219 was £96,369, and the highest paid director earned £546,000.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Chris Brassington: Hackers Go Mobile: Is Your Cell Phone Prepared?
July 23rd, 2009 |
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Make sure you are aware of the sheer extent of personal data you are storing and exchanging on your mobile, and take steps to prevent that from getting into the wrong hands
Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater: Community Organizing for Peace
July 23rd, 2009 |
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Having spent the past decade advocating in different congressional districts for peace in the Middle East, I have found a similar response: elected officials act when they hear from their constituents.
Voice technology firm under fire
July 23rd, 2009 |
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By Rory Cellan-Jones
Technology correspondent, BBC News
A UK firm that turns mobile messages into text faces questions over its privacy standards, technology and finances following a BBC investigation.
Spinvox’s service aims to convert voice messages into text messages using advanced speech recognition software.
But claims to the BBC suggest that the majority of messages have been heard and transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines.
The firm declined to comment on how many messages are ‘read’ in this way.
"Speech algorithms do not learn without human intervention and all speech systems require humans for learning – Spinvox does this in real-time," the firm said in a statement.
"The actual proportion of messages automatically converted is highly confidential and sensitive data," it added.
"It may be helpful if the company is clearer about the likelihood that people will be used to translate messages"
Information Commissioner’s Office
The Spinvox website claims its technology "captures spoken words and feeds them into a Voice Message Conversion System, known as ‘D2′ (the Brain)".
The company said that, when necessary, parts of messages can be sent to a "conversion expert".
The part sent is anonymised so that there is no way of tracking back a particular number or person. It will be just one of millions of messages going through the automated system on a particular day, the company said.
A Facebook group created by staff at an Egyptian call centre, which used to work for Spinvox, includes a picture of one transcribed message containing what appears to be sensitive commercial information.
It also includes an audio recording of one call, and pictures of staff at the call centre.
Spinvox said that the pictures relate to a training session, and that the call centre did not meet its stringent standards and never handled live calls.
Data protection
However, the BBC has spoken to Mohammed Mustafa, who worked at the centre.
He insisted that he and his colleagues did handle live messages, and that Spinvox computers only played a small part in transcribing them.
"The machine doesn’t understand anything," he explained. "You have to start typing when you hear the message."
Other call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines have discussed on blogs how they have also transcribed calls for Spinvox.
A source at the company has told the BBC that the vast majority of messages are in fact converted into text by staff at call centres.
"We are going through enormous growth as a business"
Daniel Doulton
Spinvox co-founder
The fact that messages appear to have been read by workers outside of the European Union raises questions about the firm’s data protection policy.
The firm’s entry on the UK Data Protection Register says it does not transfer anything outside the European Economic Area.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) told the BBC that it has contacted Spinvox "to ensure that its entry on the data protection register is both accurate and complete, especially with regards to the transfer of personal data outside the European Economic Area".
In a statement, the ICO explained there was nothing to prevent Spinvox from using people rather than machines to translate messages.
However, it said that "it may be helpful if the company is clearer about the likelihood that people will be used to translate messages".
"This is particularly important if customers are using the service for transmitting sensitive or secure information," it added.
Spinvox, which has raised more than $200m (£120m) from investors, was founded in 2004.
The company source told the BBC that operating large numbers of call centres is putting a huge financial burden on the business.
Last week the company’s co-founder Christina Domecq appealed to staff to take all or part of their pay for the months of July and August in the form of share options.
‘Cost-cutting measures’
In an e-mail to staff she explained that the target was to raise £1m to see the company through to profitable status.
But she warned that "should we not achieve the uptake we need, unfortunately, we may have to explore further cost-cutting measures".
Daniel Doulton, the firm’s other co-founder, told the BBC that it was true that the company had suffered some growing pains because of the exponential growth it was enjoying – bringing it 100 million customers around the world.
"The business now operates profitably," he said. "We are going through enormous growth as a business."
The BBC has also learned that Spinvox has been locked out of one of its London data centres, leaving it unable to get access to its servers after a dispute about payments.
A spokesman at ANLX, the company which runs the data centre, said "their access has been suspended. We are reviewing our options on a day-to-day basis."
Spinvox said it cannot comment on the dispute, but said its main data storage locations are not affected.
The company says it works with some of the world’s biggest telecoms companies and institutional investors who, following due diligence and audit, have gone on to sign contracts with the voice-to-text firm.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
RingCentral Offers Web-Based Phone Platform for SMBs
July 20th, 2009 |
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RingCentral leverages the cloud computing model to offer a Web-based phone system for SMBs as an alternative to traditional phone carriers such as AT T and newcomers such as Google Voice or Ifbyphone. RingCentral Office costs $99.99 per month for up to four users and includes several of the bells and whistles business users have come to associate with traditional phone and fax services.
– Much is made about Skype and Google Voice, applications that let consumers use the
Web as a medium for voice communications, but you don’t tend to hear a lot
about business phone systems living entirely in the cloud.
RingCentral aims to change that with the introduction of RingCentral Office, a …
Ken Levine: Walter Cronkite
July 18th, 2009 |
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He was just… Uncle Walter. The most trusted man in America. And now that voice has been silenced. We’ve lost the last true journalist the broadcast industry will ever see.
Menendez Serves As Voice Of Senate Democrats For Hispanic Community On Sotomayor
July 17th, 2009 |
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Back home in Union City, N.J., these last few weeks, Senator Robert Menendez would walk into a restaurant only to have someone shout the inevitable question. “Oye, ¿cómo le va a la jueza?”
Translation: “Hey, how’s it going for the judge?”
…
Getting smarter
July 17th, 2009 |
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LJ Rich finds out how technology is becoming more sophisticated in being able to distinguish songs from another and analyse their relationships.
In 2002, Click visited mobile start up firm Shazam, who was already offering a music recognition service.
The idea was to use a mobile to send a snippet of music which would be matched to a million songs on the firm’s servers at the time.
The user would then receive a text message with the track’s name.
Andrew Fisher, Shazam’s chief executive, explained that the different sound waves make identification possible.
"Every vocal performance has a different sound wave," he explained, "so it’s being able to very quickly look at that pattern and compare it against the eight million songs we have on the database, make the match and bring the result back to the consumer in around about five to 10 seconds."
‘In tune’
For users without the original music to hand, tech firm Melodis has created a desktop and mobile application called Midomi that aims to work out a tune from the crudest of renditions.
When someone sings into a phone, for instance, the program works by listening to the basic melody going in; it does not matter whether a person is singing, humming or even playing an instrument.
Melodis chief executive Keyvan Mohajer said the key and tempo is also irrelevant.
"But you do have to be in tune, and provide us enough information, to be able to match the song," he explained.
For people near tone deaf, their singing attempts can also be matched to those of other vocally challenged people.
"If a song is not in our database, [you can] sing or hum that song and save your voice, then your voice becomes a fingerprint," said Mr Mohajer.
"Next time somebody searches for a song, you match their voice to your voice to find the song."
Musican DNA
But humans are still much better at musical matching than computers – for instance we can recognise a song even if it is played in a different way.
Computers are not so sophisticated yet, but there are projects aiming to break music down into their constituent building blocks or "musical DNA".
Pandora’s Music Genome Project has created a collection of music analysis by analysing the musical qualities of songs.
These have their musical DNA charted by humans who identify "musical chromosomes" such as twangy guitars or interesting horn arrangements.
Machines are then able to provide the user with recommendations based on the results, and hopefully to their musical taste.
Charting origins
In contrast, mHashup uses a purely automated approach to discover musical relationships among tracks, displayed in a visual interface.
Unlike Midomi, it also matches timbre, or sound-type, as well as other more subtle qualities.
This sometimes produces results which seem quirky, like fitting Schubert to a Shakespearean sonnet. The system matches African tribal songs against Eastern European yodelling because of their similar melody.
However, the system is useful tool for charting the origins of music around the globe.
Michela Magas, mHashup’s designer, said she was approached by some Hollywood composers who were keen to test their compositions against large libraries.
"When they compose and they come up with something which they find is very appropriate for the movie… they cannot tell whether it is something they heard when they were young or whether it’s truly original – and this is a big deal," she said.
Of course, most human ears do all of this without needing the kind of brute force analysis and crowd sourcing that these projects rely on.
But machines are ever closer to developing a musical ear of their own.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Experts Bullish on Google Voice Mobile App for BlackBerry, Android Smartphones
July 15th, 2009 |
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Google Voice rolls out a mobile and wireless application that lets users make calls from devices such as the BlackBerry Storm and the T-Mobile G1 phone based on Android. Experts say the move may be more than a convenience, but a way for Google to insert itself between consumers and wireless carriers such as Verizon and AT T. GigaOm’s Om Malik and IDC’s Rebecca Swensen weigh in.
–
Google Voice, which lets users route calls to their home,
office and mobile phones via a single phone number, is in the
process of rolling out to select invitees in the United States. But the Google Voice
programmers aren’t resting on their laurels during the roll out.
Google Voice…
Russell Brand to play the Easter Bunny
July 15th, 2009 |
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Actor will provide the voice of the mythical character, for family-friendly film I Hop
With his bright eyes, excitable demeanour and enormous appetite for sexual conquests, it looks like the perfect role: Russell Brand, court jester of British comedy and Hollywood ingenue, has been cast as the Easter Bunny.
Brand will provide the voice of the chocolate egg-bearing rabbit in a new family comedy based on a mix of live-action and CGI, titled I Hop. The story centres on a jobless slacker who runs over the Easter Bunny while driving home late, Variety reports. With the creature unable to fulfil his usual duties due to a broken leg, the man is forced into action to help save Easter. As they get to know each other while going about their work, it turns out the new comrades are both running from adulthood.
Tim Hill, who shot similar fare with last year’s hugely successful Alvin and the Chipmunks, will direct for Universal and Illumination Entertainment.
Producer Chris Meledandri said: “Russell showed me that he’s got a wonderful ability not only to be funny in his own body, but he can create humour vocally, which is the distinction we need for these movies,” Meledandri said. “This gives us an opportunity to re-mythologise the holiday around an Easter Bunny character that is as dynamic and irreverent as Russell is.”
The script is by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio, who worked on another Illumination project, Despicable Me, which is in cinemas on 9 July in the US. Brand is part of a voice cast which includes Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Kristen Wiig and Julie Andrews.
The former TV presenter is currently lining up a number of Hollywood projects, including Judd Apatow’s Get Him to the Greek, in which he reprises his role as British rocker Aldous Snow from last year’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and remakes of Drop Dead Fred, and Oscar-winning comedy Arthur.
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Otis Taylor:Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs
July 14th, 2009 |
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By: Dennis Cook
The most exciting, creative new voice to emerge from the blues world in the past decade continues to confound expectations on his tenth album, Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs (released June 23 on Telarc). As the title implies, the theme of love swirls in this latest baker’s dozen, but the ribbons, bows and romance novel cliches are ditched for a harder, sturdier kind of love full of heat and calloused endurance.
For a musician known for sussing out the wonder of simplicity, often kicking around a single chord for a good spell just to see what might be seen, Taylor drives outwards from his African-rooted incisiveness to create a song cycle that’s amorous without being drippy, an adult conception of universally held feelings that’s commensurately weighted. New to the Taylor mix are succulent piano (courtesy of jazz riser Jason Moran) and flamenco and electric accents from U.K. guitar hero (and Taylor pal) Gary Moore. Daughter Cassie Taylor continues her upward climb as both a singing siren and fine, feel-oriented bassist, and there’s African accented percussion, cello, glinting cornet and Otis’ own sublime, frequently understated guitar and banjo. There’s no one else putting together these components in quite the same way, and with each passing year and each new release Taylor proves himself one of the preeminent musicians of our time. Pentatonic Wars once again finds him commingling deep traditions in ways that give them fresh voice and renewed life. While the label “trance blues” is the most frequent tag for his sound, this new set goes some ways towards stealing ANY shorthand for his work. As with all true originals, Otis Taylor’s music stand alone.
The songs here examine love from many angles, from a lost guitar to the respite of a Sunday morning bed to something perhaps higher and more elusive to human beings. While his gift for finely chosen expressions repeated mantra-like for maximum impact remains as a thread, there’s a whole boatload of new wrinkles here, perhaps most poignantly a delicacy and pronounced sensuality (often expressed in vibe more than actual words) that some of his more hard-nosed, unsentimental tales have sometimes lacked. He’s a truth-teller, utterly unafraid to go where his muse takes him, and while some that walk this oft-dark path can feel morose, Taylor just feels resoundingly honest, telling it like it is, without moralizing or hand holding, and leaving it for us to sort out. To hear him tackle love is a real treat and assures him another spot on Best Albums of the Year lists far and wide.
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