An interview with our residents – Vox Sciences

Over the coming months we’re going to begin featuring businesses that are resident in our co-working spaces and others who we support through our Virtual Office Services. Today is the first in the series and we’d like to introduce you to Tushar from Vox Sciences.

If you ever wish you could just get your answerphone messages in a simple to read and quick to scan email rather than having to waste time dialing in each time, Vox Sciences have a great app that might be right up your street. And we’ve managed to twist their arm and get you a great offer for you from them… Here’s 2 months on their premium service completely free!

Tushar and the team are resident at our Paul Street office and Tushar recently took some time out to talk to us about what they do and how they’re making waves in voice-to-text technology.

THM: What does Vox Sciences do?

VS: We convert audio or voice mail into text, so that people can read their messages rather than the time consuming process of listening to them. We transcribe customer feedback and run analysis on these as well as transcribing voice mail from landlines or mobile phones.

THM: How did you get started?

VS: I met Ken Blackman in a previous business venture and whilst discussing voice transcriptions, we had the idea of automating the process or at least semi automating it. My background was in artificial intelligence having studied this for my masters at Imperial College London and I was dead keen on using this in the real world. We embarked on a project to write our own automated voice recognition engine and initially use it to transcribe voicemail messages on mobile phones.

We realised that many people just weren’t checking their voice messages as the process of dialling in was time consuming and noisy environments or business meetings also made this impractical. So, we provide high quality audio transcriptions for business via our cloud based API along with analytics.

THM: Did you bootstrap your business or find funding to get off the ground?

VS: We bootstrapped the company from a CRM company I have which already had vast amounts of servers, staff and office space. This allowed us to get up and running instantly and more importantly start selling and accessing what the market needs were.

THM: What advice would you give to someone going through a similar process/stage.

VS: My main advice is to get up and running as quick as possible to see what the market needs really are. Often when you start a business doing something you quickly realise that people want something else related. You need to be quick to adapt and flexible. When we started we planned on mainly doing voice mail for mobile phones, but within months we were transcribing large amounts of audio files for voice of the customer.

THM: What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken for your business and how did it turn out?

VS: We invested heavily in a new data centre and high powered servers to cope with future demand for the service which came at a huge cost. As we are CPU intensive cloud hosted services worked out way too costly and setting up our own server farm was essential. We now have some state of the art GPU and CPU servers with large amounts of storage in a secure environment.

THM: You’ve been at The Hoxton Mix for quite a few years. How did you find out about us in the first place and what was it about a co-working space that appealed to you?

VS: We had our own office premises for many years and after dealing with fully repairable leases and limited expansion options we opted for a fully serviced model. We found out about the Hoxton Mix from a client who had taken space within the Hoxton Mix and we loved the atmosphere!

THM: What are the main benefits you find from being a resident in our co-working space?

VS: The Hoxton mix is a vibrant atmosphere with many other companies working under one roof, it provides a balanced atmosphere where networking is a daily occurrence with people working on many different projects.

THM: That’s great to hear. And finally, what’s next?

VS: We’ve been expanding world wide and are planning on opening server farms in the US and ASIA this year to cope with localised demand for our product. We’ve also been working on other languages and plan on releasing these shortly.

We’ve also been working on expanding our web based analytics package to provide insight on voice of the customer data via audio, text, emails and social media. This has opened up an entirely new market for us and allows us to target the entire vertical! We’re also improving our voice recognition engine by training newer and better engines.

Thanks for your time Tushar, we look forward to hearing how things progress over the next year!