SpinVox Keeps the Roll Outs Rolling Down Under
Today, SpinVox, a voicemail-to-text provider, will begin a partnership with SingTel Optus, the second largest telecommunications carrier on the Australian continent.
Optus, a subsidiary of Singapore Telecommunications, owns and operates its own network infrastructure with additional services from other providers.
The Optus deal comes on the heels of an agreement in February that saw SpinVox partnering with Telstra, Australia’s largest carrier, to provide voicemail-to-text to its entire gamut of customers. Telstra, having once been a government-owned monopoly, still represents 66 percent of the Australian market share today, reports BuddeComm. In 2010, the firm is expected to still command 65 percent of the market.
When asked if the Optus deal was in any part motivated by the Telstra deal, Rachael Lyons, director of North American communications for SpinVox, responded by email that her company is involved in simultaneous conversations with carriers around the world and that rollouts are dictated by carriers themselves. However, without alluding to Optus directly, she added that once one carrier launches in a geography, its customers get exposed to the product and demand is created. Other carriers may want to respond to “get a slice.”
“We saw this effect in Canada where an initial launch of SpinVox with Sasktel was followed quickly by the entry into the market of Rogers Wireless and TELUS with SpinVox services,” Lyons writes.
Optus could not be reached for comment.
From SpinVox’s perspective, the Optus deal further concretizes its position in the Australian telecommunications market—a relatively young market as far as private enterprise is concerned. The sector was traditionally closed off to private competition and has only been fully open to private providers for a little more than a decade. Optus (once partially owned by the British government), however, has had a presence since 1974 when it was given entrée as part of pro-competition legislative measures. Other companies were prevented from entering until 1997, and Optus was able to capture and retain the second largest share of market.
“This deal confirms yet again that SpinVox is the preferred choice for carriers and has become the standard in the speech-to-text conversion market,” writes Daniel Doulton, SpinVox co-founder and chief strategy officer, in an email to Speech Technology.
He also writes that the company presently has more than 30 million users and that its partners expect it to have more than 100 million by the year’s close.