Nuance takes axe to Spinvox users; service closed within days

Having once been hailed as a fast-rising technology star, the UK-based voice-to-text pioneer, Spinvox, has announced that its consumer service will close at the end of this week.

Nuance, the company that acquired the loss-making Spinvox late last year, has stated that it would now be focusing its efforts on integrating SpinVox's operator-based services with its own speech recognition platform to help it scale to meet the needs of its existing customer base.

This move, according to observers, could lead to job cuts within Spinvox which has been criticised by Nuance for its poor handling of financial accounts and the quality of its former and existing management. Apparently, the company had failed to adequately capture all necessary information to administer state tax payments properly and to identify expenses that were personal to the CEO, Christina Domecq.

While the number of affected users is probably is the low thousands, rival service providers are already promoting their speech-to-text capabilities as an alternative to Spinvox.

VoxSciences is touting for business by stating that it is ready to receive SpinVox clients looking for a replacement service. CEO, Ken Blackman, said, "VoxSciences operates a very similar service to Spinvox and we welcome all former Spinvox customers."

An alternative option is being offered by HulloMail. It claims that its visual voicemail service provides messages and missed calls directly to users' mobile app, email and/or their My HulloMail online account. Users can then play the voicemail, as well as save, forward or post it onto social media sites or forums as an MP3 file.

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