I’m a big fan of Ping fm. And if you’ve
read any of my posts before, you’ll know I’m an advocate of joined-up thinking
as well.’Therefore, a tool that allows you to simultaneously update multiple networks just makes sense. There are of course, a gazillion applications (that’s an awful lot) that allow you to do this – but the UI is clean, the sign up is pain-free, and it just works. I also love the fact that Ping’s sign up email includes a ‘stalk me’ feature, as well as the uber cool one-click copy & paste tool. Simple things people, simple things.
I have to say I’m slightly perplexed about the recent trend for adding an ‘fm’ to the end of company names. But that said; in the case of Ping it’s very credible. Ping is a reverse (or push if you will) aggregator, so it’s still a broadcaster of sorts.
But anyway – to the point and more exciting news. Today, Ping is introducing a plug-in for SpinVox. It seems like a no-brainer, with ‘say it’ being Ping’s mantra, and SpinVox leading the charge towards changing the voice to text landscape.
The concept is fairly self-explanatory - make one phone call, update up to 30 networks at once. In an age where you can update everything (pretty much) from any device – the last thing you want to be doing is logging-in multiple times to write the same thing. This takes that that concept the next level, as with SpinVox, you just need to spend a minute on the phone to do the same job immediately.
I caught up with James Whatley at SpinVox (Whatleydude) about this yesterday;
“Like the social networks through SpinVox application before it, one of the best things about this is that it turns the ‘I was’ into ‘`I am’. Ping has covered every outgoing base, and almost every incoming – so therefore, introducing voice as a new channel makes utter sense.”
I was a SpinVox convert just under a month ago, and now I’m hooked. I’d make a bet with any of you that you don’t realise how much you use voicemail until it’s recorded in such a way. Point in case, the day after I was introduced, my battery died and my mobile was utterly useless. But, I was still receiving my VM’s via email, so all was saved.
I also caught up with Sean McCullough, CEO & Founder of Ping fm about the launch (major coup), in which he made reference to the demand for voice to text;
“It's been one of the top requested features since our launch in March 2008. We're all about making social networks as easy as possible. We currently allow our users a variety of entry points on posting messages. Adding the SpinVox capability just adds yet another way to communicate to your friends in a very easy and natural way.”
I did wonder about the consistency rate of global accents etc from SV’s perspective, but it seems that that’s not an issue at all. Sean has tested it thoroughly and James is utterly confident about conversions, pointing out that; “SpinVox is live in five continents and four languages with US English and Spanish being our highest turnover of messages. PLUS we’ve got a user reported success rate of 97%.”
According to Sean, Ping chose to work with SpinVox even after being queried by other similar companies as they “simply have the best service in their market”. It’s fantastic for a UK-based company to get the recognition they deserve. Job done. You can sign up to Ping as a new user within minutes, and current users can simply add a new device to start using mobile updates.