Spinvox, a UK-based company providing voicemail transcription services, was discovered to have been using human agents to transcribe messages rather than artificial intelligence. 

Spinvox had always maintained that its "state-of-the-art" speech recognition technology was the basis of its voicemail transcription service. 

However, company insiders revealed to the media that Spinvox had call centers in South Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere comprising over 8,000 human agents transcribing speech into text. Insiders indicated that less than 2 percent of messages were actually handled by the company's automated translation services.

In response, Spinvox attempted to defend its practices by stating that it had made substantial improvements in automation. Co-founder Daniel Doulton claimed that the company had reduced the use of human quality-control staff by 98 percent over two years, asserting that they were close to solving reliable automatic speech conversion.

The controversy cast doubt on Spinvox's honesty, integrity and transparency and pointed at major limitations in the company's products and services.