@SpinVox Rocks. Simple as that really...
I'm having a bit of a slow day today. We have a recording session tomorrow (which I'm really looking forward to - it's in an amazing, secret venue :)), but that means today is preparation day. Bouncing tracks, preparing clicks, and a lot of waiting around really... so I took the opportunity of being sat at my desk to try out SpinVox (http://www.spinvox.com) - and put simply, it's brilliant. For those who don't know about their service, you phone up a dropbox, leave a message, and their clever little elves convert it into text which can be texted or emailed back to you, to other people's mobiles, or indeed straight onto your blog; all powered by D2 (or as they slightly scarily call it, 'The Brain').
I can see so many uses for this (their primary 'business' is converting your voicemail into text and forwarding it to your mobile, which I can see a stack of uses for), but today was just about playing around with it. So I left 'The Brain' two messages, just reading from a magazine and a book that were on my desk. WAT I SED:"Exploring mash-up ideas in pop. Pop has its detractors and there's little wonder when you consider that kickstarting a career these days simply involved auditioning for a variety of Saturday night entertainment shows and courting the public vote. However, for producers, pure pop..." - at which point their memo service cut me off. Quite rightly :). WAT IT SED BAK 2 ME:
"Exploring mash up ideas in pop. Pop, have it to tractors and is little wonder when you consider that kick starting a career these days, simply involves auditioning for a variety of Saturday night entertainment shoes and courting the public vote. However, for producers pure pop" Not bad. I like the idea of pop having "tractors", and "Saturday night entertainment shoes" (I want some of them), but I'd say that was pretty accurate. Now for the slightly harder test... WAT I SED:
"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, almost like a whale, insects in the water... we might expect, on my theory, that such individuals would occasionally have given rise to new species , having anomalous habits, and with their structure either slightly or considerably modified from that of the proper type." WAT IT SED BAK 2 ME:
"In north America, the Black bear was seen Huns(?) swimming for hours with widely open mouth. Thus catching almost like a whale insects in the water. We might expect on my theory that such individuals would occasionally have given rise to new species having anomalous habit. And with their structure either slightly or considerably modified from that of their proper type." Bloody spot on. It appears 'The Brain' is well read, with it's only real error getting a name wrong (unsuprising really) and missing an 's' of habit - which I probably garbled anyway. OK, the punctuation is a bit out, but it's not bad. So, if you can see uses for this kind of service, I'm loving it. Their website isn't clear about what you pay for and what comes free, but I thank @Whatleydude (http://whatleydude.com and http://www.twitter.com/Whatleydude) for clearing that up - they charge for the Voicemail conversion (and that's only £5 per month). - currently I'm looking at the Blast function for texting a specific list of mobiles with a message... sounds "super-useful" :). Back to the bouncing. One more to go...
