In-Brief: SpinVox reveals its vision for mobile search and mobile advertising services that will harness its voice-to-text technology to pick up on clues in voicemail exchanges to deliver users relevant results in an unobtrusive way. It’s not here yet, but you can bet on some deployments this year as mobile search providers and operators take notice.

Talk about timing! I first met SpinVox co-founder Daniel Doulton last summer at the company headquarters in the U.K., a mind-meld during which we discussed the progress the company had made (its voice-to-screen technology now lets users post to their Facebook, Twitter and Jaiku sites by simply speaking into their mobile handset) and the potential for the same technology to supercharge mobile search and enable the delivery targeted mobile advertising. It was an invigorating exchange and I put in my request for a podcast when the time was right.

I got my wish this week and had an exclusive interview with Daniel just a few days before the news broke that SpinVox has raised more than $100 million in funding from a Goldman Sachs Group unit and other institutional investors. The cash allows the company to expand its presence in North America and introduce voice-to-text services in more languages. (The company has deals with 12 mobile operators and plans to double that number this year. It is negotiating with all the top U.S. network operators and expects to announce two deals in the next quarter.)

I’ll bet SpinVox also uses the investment to move its strategy of enabling what Daniel calls “implicit mobile search” a quantum leap forward.

The scenario: An exchange between friends looking for a suitable restaurant to meet might trigger the service to suggest a few nearby restaurants, complete with a link to a local map or even driving directions. “It’s a fascinating ability that we now have in the actual voice message conversion system, which obviously has a semantic ability. And by that I mean; it can actually link together intelligently, keywords and messages that would make up an intelligent request or a search query.”

Listen to the podcast here. [10:56]

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Nuts & bolts: Staying in touch with social networking sites and services is at the core of what makes SpinVox useful and addictive. “We have made it as simple as making a local phone call and just speaking your message.” Users can express what they feel when they feel it – what SpinVox calls the “freedom to speak freely.” Users don’t need a download or an upgrade. They go to the website (www.spinvox.com) where they receive a phone number. “The next time you call that phone number from your cell phone, in fact any phone, you’ll be connected to speak directly into your account. It’s that simple and that powerful and because of its reach, it means anybody with a phone and a voice can now stay in touch wherever they are with their messaging services or their social networking products and accounts.”

Search & advertising: “With our semantic ability, we are able to immediately construct intelligent queries….When you think of it that way, you suddenly open up a very big horizon of possibility between messages that contain coordinate data [or] contain other commercially valuable data.” The result: Make implicit search a part of our daily routine and exchange. “It’s a very different proposition from the classic above-the-line approach of injecting adverts and banners and other types of branded content.”

Concrete plans: SpinVox is in discussions with operators and mobile search companies. “But it’s not something that I’ll pull out of my bag in the next month…. So I’d expect us to be showing this [service] later this year.” One thing for sure: “We already have several carriers who are more than just interested in supporting us in releasing this ability to market very quickly.”

P.S. Shortly after the interview, Jane Henry (thanks again for setting up both the meeting in the U.K. and the podcast interview this week) circled back an announcement that literally speaks volumes (no pun intended) about the company’s direction.

Dr Tony Robinson has joined SpinVox as director of its Advanced Speech Group (ASG). According to the release, Robinson’s remit will be to further develop the Voice Message Conversion System that is at the heart of SpinVox services. Clearly, SpinVox is building its capabilities to deliver high accuracy real-time speech recognition in challenging environments. “SpinVox is the Google of speech – it has successfully cornered the market for voice conversion services, and the accumulated resources it has assembled represent a huge opportunity for ambitious speech developers and researchers to build their careers,” Robinson said in a statement. The comparison could be more on the mark than we think. When it comes to mobile search and advertising we have seen only the beginning of SpinVox’s huge potential in this area.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Content Discovery, Local Search, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking, Multimodal Search, Podcasts, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.