The press release from SpinVox is one of the most worrying things I've heard for a while. Not so very long ago (200 years?), most people worked in agriculture; then machines came, were able to do their jobs better and cheaper, so hungry people drifted in search of work from the countryside to the new towns, and mostly worked as "machine minders" in newly invented factories. Then we moved into a "post-industrial" world. Dirty, smelly "metal bashing" is now done in the third world (where labour is cheap) and we in the West mostly work in "service industries". That's started to be whittled away by ever-cheaper telecoms and the ability to open and run call-centres in the Punjab cost-effectively.

I've been predicting (for several years) that eventually voice-type recognition would achieve the same degree of accuracy as OCR... and that when it did, the impact on employment would be catastrophic, with the majority of those whose jobs get wiped out being women. Farming jobs are gone... Industrial jobs are gone... when jobs in the "service sector" get wiped out, there IS no other area of the economy remaining to migrate into, except maybe the civil service?!

The current recession is probably great news for SpinVox - every company needs to cut costs in the current climate. And what better way of doing it than taking an axe to the staff payroll? But it's probably BAD news for everybody except SpinVox. Mass-unemployment carries a terrible social burden: broken marriages, increased domestic violence and street crime...