This is outstanding... The twins dressed as Sherry and Teri are the best...
Monday, March 12, 2007
Monday, March 5, 2007
Spinvox (Part 2)
OK so David recently blogged a new service called Spinvox. They have a novel kind of idea and a terrifically frightening web site. The background photo on the main page was too intense for me and I had to go back to a less intimidating web page immediately. My thoughts on the service will, therefore, be pretty much uninformed. Like a picture of an airplane as drawn by a cave man, the basic idea is pretty close but there are bound to be some wild inaccuracies and maybe a dragon head thrown in for good measure.
The idea behind Spinvox is that you are way too busy to actually listen to the people who have called you. They will, in all likelihood, go on about unimportant details such as their grocery lists or the exotic diseases they have recently contracted. No one wants to hear about these things. So instead, Spinvox will route your voice mails to a handy call center where a friendly call center employee will listen to them. Yes, that's right. The call center employee will then transcribe the contents of the message and send it to your cell phone as a text message. You can now READ about Heather's grocery list instead of hearing her prattle on about how she can never find English Cucumber, even at the Fresh Market.
My problem with the whole thing is the idea of the call center employees listening to my calls. Mainly because I DESPERATELY want that job. I have a voyueristic streak a mile wide and the idea of getting paid to listen in on people's voice mails is inifinitely appealing to me. I would imagine you have to wade through a lot of boring messages. If they are anything like my own, most of them probably consist of "Hey, it's me. Call me back." But once in a great while, you would HAVE to hit voice mail gold. Something like a confessed wife-killing or a scandalous affair! Maybe even a Celebrity Scandalous Affair! I suppose hoping for a Celebrity Scandal Baby to come out of it is probably too much to ask for.
The other thing that worries me about the idea of this service is whether or not my voice mails would be worth the time and effort to transcribe. Most of them consist of "Hey, it's me. Call me back." How will the call-screeners even know who that came from? Without a thorough grounding in my friends' various idiosyncracies, I can't imagine how they're going to have any idea. And that's not even touching on the worst of it! Inevitably, one of my friends is going to decide it's a clever idea to test the limits of the poor call-screeners. I will receive a text message that just reads "Poop." Or maybe "Heard about the chlamydia - what a bummer! Does your mom know?" This is the sort of thing they will find amusing and I will just find upsetting as I sit and fret over the opinions of the Call Center Employees.
It turns out that I am concerned about how an outside listener would perceive the contents of MOST of my messages... Peter, for instance, would gain a certain degree of celebrity within the call center community, due to the nature of our calls to one another. Our voice mail messages are generally left in the voices of any of a variety of characters we have created to entertain ourselves. The Old Man voice is very popular and generally involves something to do with medication, culminating in eventually dozing off towards the end of the message. I'm not sure how the Old Man's loud snores would be translated to text. I'll leave that for the experts. Equally puzzling to the Call Center Employees might be the back and forth banter of Betty and Helens, two midwestern housewives who frequently swap recipes, stories, and embarrassing personal revelations via voice mail.
But by far the worst will be the gibberish messages. I can't help but pity the Call Center Employee who has the unenviable task of phonetically transcribing "Mook tlak bakka woongabbalah" . I picture the Call Center Crew huddled around a speaker phone, listening intently, with their eyes slightly squinted in deep concentration. "I think I heard 'poop'", one will say.
The idea behind Spinvox is that you are way too busy to actually listen to the people who have called you. They will, in all likelihood, go on about unimportant details such as their grocery lists or the exotic diseases they have recently contracted. No one wants to hear about these things. So instead, Spinvox will route your voice mails to a handy call center where a friendly call center employee will listen to them. Yes, that's right. The call center employee will then transcribe the contents of the message and send it to your cell phone as a text message. You can now READ about Heather's grocery list instead of hearing her prattle on about how she can never find English Cucumber, even at the Fresh Market.
My problem with the whole thing is the idea of the call center employees listening to my calls. Mainly because I DESPERATELY want that job. I have a voyueristic streak a mile wide and the idea of getting paid to listen in on people's voice mails is inifinitely appealing to me. I would imagine you have to wade through a lot of boring messages. If they are anything like my own, most of them probably consist of "Hey, it's me. Call me back." But once in a great while, you would HAVE to hit voice mail gold. Something like a confessed wife-killing or a scandalous affair! Maybe even a Celebrity Scandalous Affair! I suppose hoping for a Celebrity Scandal Baby to come out of it is probably too much to ask for.
The other thing that worries me about the idea of this service is whether or not my voice mails would be worth the time and effort to transcribe. Most of them consist of "Hey, it's me. Call me back." How will the call-screeners even know who that came from? Without a thorough grounding in my friends' various idiosyncracies, I can't imagine how they're going to have any idea. And that's not even touching on the worst of it! Inevitably, one of my friends is going to decide it's a clever idea to test the limits of the poor call-screeners. I will receive a text message that just reads "Poop." Or maybe "Heard about the chlamydia - what a bummer! Does your mom know?" This is the sort of thing they will find amusing and I will just find upsetting as I sit and fret over the opinions of the Call Center Employees.
It turns out that I am concerned about how an outside listener would perceive the contents of MOST of my messages... Peter, for instance, would gain a certain degree of celebrity within the call center community, due to the nature of our calls to one another. Our voice mail messages are generally left in the voices of any of a variety of characters we have created to entertain ourselves. The Old Man voice is very popular and generally involves something to do with medication, culminating in eventually dozing off towards the end of the message. I'm not sure how the Old Man's loud snores would be translated to text. I'll leave that for the experts. Equally puzzling to the Call Center Employees might be the back and forth banter of Betty and Helens, two midwestern housewives who frequently swap recipes, stories, and embarrassing personal revelations via voice mail.
But by far the worst will be the gibberish messages. I can't help but pity the Call Center Employee who has the unenviable task of phonetically transcribing "Mook tlak bakka woongabbalah" . I picture the Call Center Crew huddled around a speaker phone, listening intently, with their eyes slightly squinted in deep concentration. "I think I heard 'poop'", one will say.
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