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Don’t get me wrong - I absolutely love Speech-to-Text. The idea of speaking the text on the screen into existence plays very heavily into my theories on what Web 2.0 should be. Effortlessly updating my blog from any device capable of transmitting my voice? Brilliant!

Or at least it should be. SpinVox continues to fail hard. Today they announced added support for their Speech-To-Text interfacing with Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook, and it motivated me to log back in to a private beta account I was granted a month or so ago. My first experience was somewhat disappointing. I was able to get out about three sentences in the short time limit they gave me, and all three had words wrong enough to change the meaning of the sentences. Unfortunately, the posting directly to the blog part of the system worked flawlessly, so all my readers got treated to some rather interestingly garbled text.

I logged back in today, since after emailing them about the short length of record time being insufficient to make substantial blog posts with they upped my time limit. I tried calling in and recording what ended up being several minutes of me talking a bit about my previous editorial on UGC. I could describe how abysmal the results were, but I’ll let you read for yourself.

What I said: “Ok, well, let’s see… What am I talking about? Oh! Actually I put a new article up on Mashable.com today. ”
What I said, SpinVoxed: “Ok well, see what I’m talking about oh actually put a new article of nashville.com(?) today.”

What I said: “It’s that YouTube or whatever may have helped them get there quicker, citing the new Apple UGC ad that came out as an example.”
What I Said, SpinVoxed: “It’s that a youtube or whatever may have helped them get their quick or setting the new apple UGC ad,…”

What I said: “It’s staying on and letting me talk and so I’m just gonna talk until this thing kicks me off.”
What I said, SpinVoxed: “It’s sticking on let me talk and so I’m just gonna talk into this thing puts me off.”

You get my drift. Any single set of errors like this in a whole paragraph of text would be ok, but when there’s a whole page of sentences, each containing minor errors that can potentially change the meaning of the sentence, your post ends up looking like a stream of conscious word association game.
It’s a cool idea, this Speech-To-Text via phone thing, and I dream for the day that someone can do it right. Until then, you can count on SpinVox to turn your voice into unintelligible streams of text.

[via Mobile Marketing Magazine]

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