Who do they serve? Who do you trust?

watty

Spinvox claim to automatically and securely translate by AI (computer) messages left by voice to text.

The reality is that most of it is done by Humans.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/29/spinvox_mechanical_turk/

You think "so what" Does it matter who listens to messages left for you?

Ah but you don't know what a caller might say (which of course during the court case after you are arrested for paedophilla/Terrorism/Drugs/Spying is proven to be be a lie, you hope) that could incriminate you. Texts and emails are much more likely to be intercepted by GCHQ or others...

If they are done by Humans, isn't the Call Centre likely to Squeal if they hear a plot to blow up the Houses Of Parliament or Whitehouse.

They won't know your mate has a sick sense of humour.


BUT

Who has invested the $200M?

Who controls Spinvox? Why would anyone believe a company with no AI or Speech to text patents would be so far ahead of the rest of the Computer Industry?

A plot to get you to sign off access to all your voice mails to a 3rd party? In fact how can Spinvox make money at all even with Indian and South African call centres unless some other party (CIA?) is plugging the Finance Gap.

If your phone company offers Voice to Text, it's probably done by Spinvox.

thecommander

If you left a voicemail about plans to blow up somewhere or do an act of terrorism then you deserve to be caught. Same goes for texting and emailing.

watty

Also http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8174721.stm

The point is YOU as receipient could be ignorant and innocent of such a message, it's not you leaving messages is the issue. But you can't control who phones you and leaves a message

thecommander

watty wrote: »

But you can't control who phones you and leaves a message

If the postman reads a postcard addressed to your house, and it says theres a bomb in the centre of Dublin, does that imply you're in on it?

watty

In Many countries that would cause trouble, but people will say things on a Voice mail assuming only you will hear it. People know postcards are public.

At least everyone except my Dad. The postman handed it over saying "Very Interesting" and "Strange place to get a postcard from".

It was too


The point is:
People assume messages left on voice mail are private (Mobile) or at worst maybe listened to by family (fixed line).
If your carrier is using SpinVox, then rather than a secure computer (which is what the Carriers told), almost all, or maybe all are listened to and transcribed by over 10,000 Humans. It's not possible to do that on what Spinvox charge, so who is really paying to hear all these voice mails? Spinvox have lied about how it's done. They claim 70 patents on AI voice recognition and in reality they have two on using Human powered Voice Transcription.

Surely it's a front?

thecommander

Isnt there a CT that says the government listens to all our calls by computer anyway, so what difference does it make?

watty

Maybe they use people. These People?

King Mob

But why would any government use this company at all?
How many people actually use voice to text messaging let alone use it to plan a terrorist bombing?

And why would anyone send an incriminating voice to text message?
Has there been one example of a person being arrested because some left him a message like that?

Is there anything to suggest that the CIA is involved other than "I don't know who's financing them"?

And what about what the patents actually say?
Or what the other ones they have say?

watty

None of it makes sense.

But for sure Spinvox claimed they used Computers and had 70 patents. They have 2 patents, nothing to do with Voice Recognition, but to do with Humans working in Call centres. It's evident that despite claiming it's mostly done by computer, it's mostly done by people. We know $200M has been invested and that even with 3rd world wages, the Business Plan doesn't work doing it with Humans instead of Computer. It's priced and sold as if it is by AI.

That's all we know for definite.

The most major thing is that it's a Breach of Data Protect Act(s) and Privacy. Even if it's nothing to do with Governments, it's been a "conspiracy" with a small "c", a kind of fraud. The Mechanical Turk was of course a hoax, rather than a fraud or conspiracy.

watty

BBC update
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/07/spinvox_we_stand_by_our_story.html

They refute Spinvox answers

Diogenes

Do you really think terrorists dont use codes?

Or that the 10,000 people are all trained to recognise all secure financial, state, and security issues, so they can flag anything important?

robtri

why would a government be arsed buying into this,
its not like terrorists sign up to spinvox to listen to their voicemails...
jesus H christ thats the dumbest thing I ever heard....

also why would the govenerments need to use a crappy service like spinvox, when they already listen to the majority of calls already....
for example in the USA
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1948927&page=1

watty

The point is that ALL these sorts of things (Government or Private) are no use against smart Terrorists/DrugDealers/Paedophiles etc. They catch out Innocent people.

Governments do it for CONTROL and Private Companies for dishonest gain. Governments are not wanting to expose these kinds of Fraud because it raises quiestions about their actions.

Though the Terrorists involved in the Omagh Bombing were silly enough to use mobile Phones wrongly. (You need PAYG got anonymously and to use steganographic type voice code or text so the messages seem innoculous, then dispose of phones in a way destroy any linking DNA such as spittle or hair).

robtri

but most governments have the technology or can buy it, for themselves and use it properly... why would they use a crappy company like spinvox.... when they can do it themsleves?????

prinz

I remember that story about all telephone calls being monitored before. Certain words or phrases flag the call for attention and then it is recorded or listened into. Not sure what the evidence or basis for it was. But went through a fun phase of dropping words into conversations like President, assassination, plot, bomb, terrorist etc. Nothing ever came of it.

thecommander

prinz wrote: »

I remember that story about all telephone calls being monitored before. Certain words or phrases flag the call for attention and then it is recorded or listened into. Not sure what the evidence or basis for it was. But went through a fun phase of dropping words into conversations like President, assassination, plot, bomb, terrorist etc. Nothing ever came of it.

Did you live in America, or were you speaking to someone in America?

prinz

watty wrote: »

The point is that ALL these sorts of things (Government or Private) are no use against smart Terrorists/DrugDealers/Paedophiles etc. They catch out Innocent people.

But what would an innocent person be caught out on? . I don't know about you but I generally don't implicate myself in drug dealing, terrorism or paedophilia in phone messages.

Edit:- Besides the above mentioned phone calls got bored of it after a while.

prinz

thecommander wrote: »

Did you live in America, or were you speaking to someone in America?

Brother in America.

bonkey

While I tend to side with the idea that this is "just" somrt form of a scammy business model...

robtri wrote: »

but most governments have the technology or can buy it, for themselves and use it properly...

Really?

The connection I immediately drew from this was with Echelon.

The notable difference is that while there is some degree of knowledge about the information gathering and storage capabilities of Echelon, there is little if anything known about its data processing capability.

I always felt that Echelon was a great way to acquire information which could then be searched through given a sufficient lead. The problem being that when you collect so much information, its simply impossible to sift through the content. Seperating signal from noise is virtually impossible when you don't know what the signal is. Passing the stuff off to humans for analysis wasn't even an option....there simply wasn't the manpower.

Spinvox has a number of advantages that Echelon doesn't. Lets assume for a moment that it is some sort of government-funded spy-shop...what does it gain?

For a start, it gets to use large number of humans from foreign countries - something that would be taboo for the likes of MI5 or NSA. This makes it less impractical to use large numbers of humans, which was always the problem with Echelon. If you wanted to see everything that Joe Bloggs did, after you knew you wanted to research Joe Bloggs....Echelon was great. If you wanted to find a needle in a haystack...not much use.

Lets not stop there. What else would it gain. Well...lets imagine for a second that Spinvox is being funded by China. How, exactly, would China currently be spying on mobile communications in the UK? They wouldn't, really. Echelon was rumored on more than one occasion to have been abused for industrial espionage....that national governments abused it to give native industry information about foreign competitors, thus giving them a leg up. Spinvox could work in reverse....it gathers information in one nation, then legally sends it abroad for processing...where you can do what you like with it. Hell...don't even compromise the data centers (cause you might get caught). Just take a copy of all the data being sent to them.

Now seriously...is this a capability that most countries can buy...to position themselves to listen to voicemail from foreign nations?

One could argue that you'll never learn anything important from voicemail. Maybe that's so....I'm not so sure. Imagine what happens when the people processing your voicemail start offering "integrated services", though, where they'll also remove your spam with 100% certainty, and who knows what else...

why would they use a crappy company like spinvox.... when they can do it themsleves?????

For domestic surveillance, Echelon doesn't have the manpower to analyse the information. Spinvox does.

For non-domestic surveillance, Echelon doesn't have the capability of gathering the inforamtion in the first place. Spinvox does.

watty

For those that claim the Innocent have nothing to fear...

Read
Alexander Solzenitzen's First Circle and other books.
Kafka: The Trial, The Castle
Orwell: 1984
Shirer: Rise & Fall of the 3rd Riech
Reports about Rendition & Guantanemo Bay
The UFOlogist "hacker" being Extradited to USA
UK & Irish miscarriages of Justice in the 20th Century
The Great Ricen Plot in UK
The Brazilian shot in the Tube.
http://www.schneier.com/

watty

The Fat Lady hasn't sung yet

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/04/spinvox_visit/

robtri

Heres stuff about the NSA and why there is no need for spinvox...

The NSA warrantless surveillance controversy concerns surveillance of persons within the United States incident to the collection of foreign intelligence by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the war on terror. Under this program, referred to by the Bush administration as the "terrorist surveillance program",[1] part of the broader President's Surveillance Program, the NSA is authorized by executive order to monitor, without warrants, phone calls, e-mails, Internet activity, and text messaging, and other communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the other end of the communication lies within the U.S.
The exact scope of the program is not known, but the NSA is or was provided total, unsupervised access to all fiber-optic communications going between some of the nation's major telecommunication companies' major interconnect locations, including phone conversations, email, web browsing, and corporate private network traffic.

So they have unsupervised access to all calls in the USA, even if they originate on forgein soil,

now couple that with a patent the NSA where issued no 5937422...
see it here... http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,937,422.PN.&OS=PN/5,937,422&RS=PN/5,937,422
and it is a patent for a speech to text to database program......
hmmmmmmmm

bonkey

robtri wrote: »

Heres stuff about the NSA and why there is no need for spinvox...

At best, its why NSA don't need spinvox to monitor voicemail in the US.

What about NSA monitoring voicemail calls outside the US?
Or some non-US agency monitoring voicemail calls inside the US?

As an aside....google voice apparently offers the same services as spinVox, and more.

watty

Anyone know who does the iPhone Voice to Text? (AKA Visual Voicemail).

robtri

bonkey wrote: »

At best, its why NSA don't need spinvox to monitor voicemail in the US.

What about NSA monitoring voicemail calls outside the US?
Or some non-US agency monitoring voicemail calls inside the US?

As an aside....google voice apparently offers the same services as spinVox, and more.

but you can see the technology is available to do this without using spinvox...

who says the nsa/cia don't monitor voicemails outside of the usa... the NSA where using this technology for 6 years in the USA before it became public knowledge.... it was originally set up after 9/11 by sceret order of the president of the USA, only when it became public knowledge by somebody grassing them up to a news program did the USA admit to it and rush legislation through to make it publically legal....

So whos to say they aren't monitoring voicemails....outside the USA by sceret executive order of the president??

bonkey

robtri wrote: »

but you can see the technology is available to do this without using spinvox...

who says the nsa/cia don't monitor voicemails outside of the usa...
...
So whos to say they aren't monitoring voicemails....outside the USA by sceret executive order of the president??

You started by arguing that no-one would need to use Spinvox, because all governments either have or could buy the tech.

Now, you're saying that we can't be certain that they don't have the capability, because at least one group has something similar for their domestic market.

By the same logic, we can't be certain that the likes of Spinvox don't offer a government agency something useful....

robtri

bonkey wrote: »

You started by arguing that no-one would need to use Spinvox, because all governments either have or could buy the tech.

Now, you're saying that we can't be certain that they don't have the capability, because at least one group has something similar for their domestic market.

By the same logic, we can't be certain that the likes of Spinvox don't offer a government agency something useful....

Nope, you have picked me up wrong...

I am saying they have the technology.. to monitor all telephone calls, translate them into text and search by keyword.
What I am saying further is that 6 years ago they started doing this in the USA, by seceret executive order of the president, once it was exposed after being run for 6 years, they rushed the patriot act through giving them the legal public right to do this....

There is no information out there to say if they are monitoring calls outside the USA, but who knows if they are or not.

The technologly exists for them to do this themselves,which they are already using, so there is no need for them to use spinvox...

thecommander

watty wrote: »

Anyone know who does the iPhone Voice to Text? (AKA Visual Voicemail).

Visual Voicemail on the iPhone doesn't convert voice to text. It allows you to see on screen who left you a message, and you can play in a non linear order.

watty

Hmm, that's useless.

watty

more

All of the messages supplied by our small group of visitors tripped through to a human operator. The event was unnecessary and humiliating for all concerned. SpinVox shouldn't have had to lift its skirts; we didn't need to be there.

I'm sceptical about Echalon and US NSA. I rather think they need to have "possibly important" stuff listened to by humans.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/05/spinvox_demo_day/

The server side recognition can - unless what we were watching was all an elaborate hoax - recognize quite a few simple words in a clean room environment with no shouting, slurring, background speech or music. If it fails the machine recognition, it's sent to a QC agent in a call centre. All this has never been in dispute - what is contended is the proportion of messages that require human intervention.
...
how far away anyone is from automating the bulk of the voicemail translation in the real world.

the_syco

Diogenes wrote: »

Do you really think terrorists dont use codes?

Or that the 10,000 people are all trained to recognise all secure financial, state, and security issues, so they can flag anything important?

It's easier to do a word search on text, than on voicemail.

Because of this, it seems it'd have more use as a marketing tool. The ability to search what has the highest hits, what producty is mentioned, and to instantly know if an ad for X product is being talked about. One compnay doing this market research for other companies would be able to get great results, no?

bonkey

robtri wrote: »

I am saying they have the technology.. to monitor all telephone calls, translate them into text and search by keyword.

Maybe. The patent you link to isn't about speech-to-text. Its about auto-generation of a "topical description" from a supplied text.

But lets assume you're right. NSA have this capability. Every other intelligence agency in the world? I'm pretty sure we can agree that some - if not many - of them certainly don't. I'd hope we can also agree that its unlikely that one nation's intelligence agency is going to sell its technology to all and sundry.

From this, we should certainly be able to agree that even if the NSA don't need this technology there are other intelligence agencies in other nations who would benefit from it.

There is no information out there to say if they are monitoring calls outside the USA, but who knows if they are or not.

Again, for simplicity, lets agree. They might be....or they might not be. In fact...lets go one step further. Lets just agree that NSA is monitoring every communication from everyone on the planet.

Of course, there are still those other intelligence agencies. Unless we assume that they all are monitoring every communication from everyone on the planet, we have to accept that there are some who would benefit from getting the "foot in the door" that SpinVox would offer on monitoring communications in a foreign nation

The technologly exists for them to do this themselves,which they are already using, so there is no need for them to use spinvox...

As I believe I've just shown...even if we assume that NSA have the capabilities you claim (and it is an assumption), we still can't rule out other intelligence agencies from other nations.

bonkey

watty wrote: »

Anyone know who does the iPhone Voice to Text? (AKA Visual Voicemail).

As pointed out..iPhone doesn't do this.

Google, on the other hand...claim to do even more then spinVox...fully automated conversion.

http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html#

watty

Somebody is sueing Google for being Opaque about Privacy and Security on Google Docs and Gmail. I forget the name of the outfit.

robtri

bonkey wrote: »

Maybe. The patent you link to isn't about speech-to-text. Its about auto-generation of a "topical description" from a supplied text.

and keep reading.... "assigning a user-definable part-of-speech score to each input word; assigning a language salience score to each input word;"

bonkey wrote: »

But lets assume you're right. NSA have this capability. Every other intelligence agency in the world? I'm pretty sure we can agree that some - if not many - of them certainly don't. I'd hope we can also agree that its unlikely that one nation's intelligence agency is going to sell its technology to all and sundry.

why not, they sell everything else to all ans sundry, weapons, nuclear plans... they have no problems selling their stuff... so it is available to most intelligence agencies for the right money

bonkey wrote: »

From this, we should certainly be able to agree that even if the NSA don't need this technology there are other intelligence agencies in other nations who would benefit from it.

lets agree on that...but I still cannot fathom why any terrorist, or other people involved in large scale criminal activity would sign up to such a service... seriously thats a bit of a stretch....

I can just picture the conversation.... hey abdul, i have just signed up for this new service where a company reads all my texts and speaks them to me... so now I will have no problems in getting your message about which part of the US we are going to blow up... ehhh NO

bonkey wrote: »

Again, for simplicity, lets agree. They might be....or they might not be. In fact...lets go one step further. Lets just agree that NSA is monitoring every communication from everyone on the planet.

Of course, there are still those other intelligence agencies. Unless we assume that they all are monitoring every communication from everyone on the planet, we have to accept that there are some who would benefit from getting the "foot in the door" that SpinVox would offer on monitoring communications in a foreign nation

I would agree that others would be interested, but why use spinvox?? the risk of using a public company to front a black ops intelligence campaign is ludicrious

bonkey wrote: »

As I believe I've just shown...even if we assume that NSA have the capabilities you claim (and it is an assumption), we still can't rule out other intelligence agencies from other nations.

its not an assumption, its a fact that the NSA are currently using this sort of technology to montior domestic calls in the US...

and you can't rule out that spinvox is just a crap;y run company trying to make a few bucks in these times....