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Spinvox: A question of Nuance?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 14 Dec 09, 14:10 GMT

Remember Spinvox? The British voice-to-text start-up has been out of the news since the summer, when we revealed some serious questions about its technology and its finances.

Now the Sunday Times has reported that the company is close to a £92m sale to the American voice technology giant Nuance.

A source at Spinvox told me a few weeks back that talks were under way with Nuance - but there had been rumours of a sale to just about every big technology name you could mention. This time, though, it looks as though a deal really is in the offing.

For one thing, the Spinvox PR machine is not rubbishing the story; for another, today's deadline for the company to repay a £30m loan has been put back to the end of January, apparently to let the negotiations proceed.

The real questions are what exactly Nuance is considering buying - and why. Back in the summer, on the very day my first article about Spinvox appeared, Nuance got in touch with me.

They wanted to boast about their own world-leading technology, while implicitly criticising Spinvox, both for its claims about its ground-breaking speech recognition work and for its attitude to privacy.

Nuance told me in July that Spinvox was "absolutely not ahead of the game", and the company's spokesman was also keen to stress that "in the current climate about data privacy, being transparent is absolutely critical."

So why, just a few months later, would Nuance be interested in buying the Spinvox?

Well, there are relationships with some of the world's biggest mobile operators - notably a giant contract to supply a service to up to 100 million subscribers in South America.

Those kind of deals take years to hatch, so Nuance may see Spinvox as a short cut to a lucrative relationship with the likes of Vodafone and Telefonica.

Then there's Spinvox's Voice Message Conversion System, D2 - or "The Brain", as the company dubs it.

Speech experts at the firm still insist they have developed something innovative, even if it's more a case of humans aided by technology than technology aided by humans.

But the real value may lie in all the data that Spinvox has accumulated over the years, in the form of millions of voice recordings and the text derived from them.

How much of it is still stored on the company's servers is unclear - although I've just noticed this line in the Spinvox terms and conditions:

"We may establish general practices (and change such practices without notice) and limits concerning use of the Services, including, without limitation, the maximum number of days that messages or other uploaded Content will be retained by us."

It also makes clear that this data may be sent around the world:

"We may transfer your information outside the European Economic Area. Again, we will endeavour to comply with the Data Protection Act in respect of such transfers."

What I can't find is any reference to what happens to your old messages if Spinvox is sold to another business.

So if this deal does go through, customers will want to know what it means for the privacy and security of their data.

Shareholders will also be asking what a sale to Nuance would mean for them. Some early investors - such as Carphone Warehouse and Invesco - have already effectively written off most - if not all - of their money.

And what of those Spinvox staff who heeded appeals this summer from their boss Christina Domecq to take part of their wages in the form of stock options to help the business through to profitability?

A number of those employees have now left, but they may now be pulling those share options out of a drawer and wondering whether they are worth anything.

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'Cooling-off' for mobile phones? Not on the High Street

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 14 Dec 09, 08:55 GMT

Thinking of getting a new mobile phone for yourself or as a present this Christmas?

Well, here's a piece of advice you might want to read before you buy it in a shop. It turns out that you often get more leeway if you buy online or on the phone rather than on the High Street.

I learned this when the friend of a friend rang me in high dudgeon last week. She was due an upgrade, had gone into an Orange store to seek advice - and walked out with the Sony Ericsson Satio.

A few days later, she realised that she hated the phone - and that's probably a pretty common experience these days when the look and feel of the operating systems of these sophisticated mini-computers are key to the experience.

But when she rang the store to ask if she could exchange it, she was told she was stuck with the Satio - there was no "cooling-off period" for handsets.

I called Orange to check this out - and learned about something called the Distance Selling Directive, which was implemented by the UK back at the beginning of the decade.

It gives added protection to consumers who buy products on the internet or over the phone, and in particular guarantees them a cooling-off period in which they can withdraw from a contract for any reason.

But when you buy in a shop, you don't have that protection - once you've bought the phone and signed the contract, you're there for the duration, unless the equipment is faulty.

Orange said it was no different from other operators in applying the rules in this manner, and after a ring-around, that does appear to be the case.

Until a few years ago, many shops did offer a cooling-off period - then one operator said it was ending the practice and most of the others followed suit.

One retailer explained that if you open up a phone and turn it on, it then becomes second-hand goods, and has to be sold as a refurbished phone at a lower price - so you can see why they would be unsympathetic to customers who had simply changed their minds.

I did find three operators - O2, Virgin Mobile, and Talk Mobile - which still offered a cooling-off period to customers who bought in shops.

But as far as the rest of the industry is concerned, the message appears to be clear - go to the shop to try out a new phone, then head straight home to order it online.

Now it's confession time. I wrote this and then headed straight to a shop to buy a mobile phone for an 11-year-old. But it's his first phone, and if he doesn't like it, I have a Christmas message for him - tough!

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