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SpinVox "Recognition" Is Often Expensive Human Transcription
An anonymous reader writes "SpinVox offers to convert voice messages to text using a system called D2 or 'the Brain.' According to BBC News, said 'Brain' is often of the old-fashioned kind: SpinVox is sending private voice messages to South Africa, the Philippines, and maybe Egypt to be typed by people in a call centre, despite being registered as keeping all private data inside Europe and claiming that the text is somehow anonymised. Insiders say they transcribed 'love messages, secret messages' and everything else from beginning to end, and the company is being bled dry by the cost: SpinVox has been locked out of one of their data centers over a payment dispute. SpinVox refuses to comment further on details — but according to their web page, they're 'enabling the Speech 3.0, Voice 3.0, and Business 3.0 markets,' whatever that means."
Seriously. If their target market is English speakers and the people doing the translating don't speak English as their primary language... dude. Seriously. Nevermind the privacy issues here...
He's probably referring to the frequency with which vowels appear in any given word. Yes, Japanese has only 5 vowels, but because almost all syllables in the language are simple (1 consonant)(1 vowel) pairs, almost every other letter in a written word is a vowel.
A common tongue twister:
Nama-mugi, nama-gome, nama-tamago (uncooked wheat, uncooked rice, uncooked eggs)
Notice the abundance of vowels.