SpinVox’s consumer swan song

Troubled voice to text pioneer SpinVox is cutting off its consumer users this week, as the company’s new owner prepares to focus on operator partnerships.

SpinVox confirmed long standing rumours that it was up for sale by announcing its acquisition by speech recognition firm Nuance in late December, for approximately $102.5m, comprising $66m in cash and $36.5m in Nuance common stock.

Nuance was unimpressed with the way SpinVox had been run, noting that the firm “incurred large historical losses, owing to expenses associated with its international expansion and substantial staffing.”

The firm is understood to be cutting the headcount at SpinVox and last week sent a message to its undisclosed number of consumer users telling them their service will be disconnected by March 27. Nuance is instead integrating SpinVox’s carrier services with its own speech recognition platform to help it scale to meet the needs of its existing customer base. This means Nuance will have a carrier-grade voice-to-text service that can handle millions of messages per day, with support for English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Portuguese among other languages.

Keen to fill SpinVox’s now abandoned shoes, rival voice to text firm VoxSciences is touting for business by  stating that it is ready to receive SpinVox clients looking for a replacement service.

VoxSciences, CEO Ken Blackman said, “VoxSciences operates a very similar service to Spinvox and we welcome all former Spinvox customers.”