Spinvox, a UK-based company reputedly providing voicemail transcription services, was discovered to have been using human agents to manually transcribe users' private voice messages without their knowledge or meaningful consent, raising concerns about privacy, deception of consumers and investors, and data protection violations.

Company insiders revealed to the BBC that Spinvox was transferring voicemail data out of the European Union to call centers in South Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere comprising over 8,000 human agents transcribing speech into text, in breach of its entry on the UK Register of data controllers.

Personal and professionally sensitive messages were being listened to by strangers, with SpinVox reputedly retaining recordings of messages "for as long as possible." Less than 2 percent of messages were actually handled by the company's automated translation services, according to the company insiders.

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

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.

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• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm

• https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/29/spinvox_mechanical_turk

• https://www.telecoms.com/enterprise-telecoms/spinvox-says-humans-are-necessary-for-time-being

• https://thenextweb.com/news/humans-have-been-listening-to-our-ai-transcribed-conversations-for-over-a-decade