12 more countries to get mobile voice-to-text from Telefonica and SpinVox

Late last year, Chilean mobile operator Movistar launched a speech-to-text service from SpinVox. Today Movistar’s parent company, Telefonica, has announced that it is now going to launch the SpinVox service in another 12 countries in Latin America.

While there are quite a few speech-to-text services available, SpinVox has the largest number of languages in one service. Speakers of Spanish, English, French, German, Portuguese and Italian can use the transcribing service - SpinVox has even optimized for the dialects of Spanish and Portuguese spoken in the different countries.

The new countries Telefonica is extending the service to are are Argentina; Colombia; Ecuador; El Salvador; Guatemala; Mexico; Nicaragua; Panama; Peru; Uruguay and Venezuela. SpinVox is also coming to Brazil from Telefonica’s joint venture with Portugal Telecom, Vivo.

From the release:

SpinVox co-founder and CEO, Christina Domecq: “This has already established the company as the market leader on five continents, creating a new category that enables Carriers to turn everyday speech into billable revenue to deliver an immediate and positive ARPU impact. We’re changing the way we all communicate, do business and keep in contact with our social networks: using one simple and efficient messaging tool - SpinVox.”

Luis Miguel Gilperez, Director, Mobile Business at Telefonica Latinoamerica: “Providing the best customer experience is a key objective of everything we do. That is highlighted today with the announcement of our partnership with SpinVox. Our customers will be able to receive via SMS all their voicemail messages, and, from the callers’ point of view, they will leave messages with the security that they will be delivered in a few minutes directly to the recipient as a text.”

What we think?

Speech-to-text mobile messaging is still an awesome idea - but the popularity of transcription services didn’t really take off until Visual Voice Mail caughy everyone’s imagination.