But just how innovative and creative is SpinVox?

Well, you have to admire the company's chutzpah. The achieved record growth. Everyone wants to buy their automated transcription service. Your voice messages are spun into text, converted by some duper dooper voice recognition technology.

I phoned Xpert Communications (for example) unexpectedly belched when asked for a name by their voice recognition system, and got put through to someone in accounts.

So, what is the secret of their success?

Do they really have the technology? Or is it done by humans?

Let's examine the evidence.

Spinvox has transcription centres in Barbados, Ireland, India as well as home workers in South Africa. The application is called Tenzing ( it used to be called Fruitbat) and has dictionaries and predictive text for English, Spanish and French languages as well as regional dialects like French-Canadian.

According to some, there is no super-duper voice transcription engine. Allegedly, it's all carbon based.

“Look for a company called Celtic doing the work in Ireland,” says our insider. “The South African operation is run by the parents (John and Maureen) of the Spinvox VP for security and compliance (Sean Groenewald).”

Gerald Groenewald, Sean's Brother, left the company in mysterious circumstances a few months back.

As a user of SpinVox, I'm not bothered if it's done by a machine or a man. Or even a woman. I'm that liberal. Who cares, as long as it works.

And it does, especially efficiently, I notice, if your mates have Indian names. Whereas a lot of English names seem to get mistranslated. SpinVox's 'voice recognition' technology couldn't recognise the words Johnson King, for example, but if my mate Subhas calls, his name will be spelt perfectly.

European names always seem to get mangled, but difficult (to me anyway) sounding Indian names get converted perfectly.

Only two questions here: Do everyone really want their personal voicemail read by people before they receive it?

And secondly, what if the stock market valuation of SpinVox is dependent on ownership of its voice recognition machines?

A spinvox spokesman told us, "We have over 50 patents for our voice recognition technology."

However, he told us he was unable to divulge, for competitive reasons, the secrets of SpinVox's invention.