Archive for the 'Voice/ Phone' Category

The great thing about email is that it’s very easy to drop an e-mail to someone, knowing that they can pick it up at their leisure and respond at their leisure. Unlike the phone, you don’t both have to stop what you’re doing in order to make and take the call at the same time.

But the problem with e-mail is that you had to be sitting at the computer to type out the text of your message and then to send it. There have been times when I have been on my way to work or just out and about without access to a computer — and certainly with no possibility of sitting down and typing a detailed message — when I have remembered that I need to contact someone to tell them some particular information. I could phone them using my mobile phone but it would typically be that time of day or evening when they would be either busy at work, in a meeting or in bed asleep — or it’s the kind of message that doesn’t really warrant my interrupting them in the middle of what they are doing. So I usually say to myself, “I must remember to e-mail them when I get home/ to work when I’ll be at a computer.” And, often, I would forget to do it!

Wouldn’t it be useful if we had a voicemail line where it worked like email? You could send them a quick voice-email that they could pick up at their leisure and responds to at their leisure. It would be handy in situations where you wanted to send them a message on the fly while you are hurrying along — and you didn’t need to specifically interrupt them with a phone call. Or if you find texting fiddly or if your message is going to be longer than 160 characters. Or you’re not very good at typing and the whole process of typing a detailed message is very laborious.

There are a couple of ways that I have discovered that can help in this kind of situation. They are Jaxtr and Dial2do, which are online applications that interface with your mobile phone - and land line, too. I will look at them in separate blog posts over the next couple of weeks. They each work in different ways and offer different functions.

First, Jaxtr.

This is primarily an online interface that allows you to make cheap international calls from one of around 50 listed countries, including USA, UK, Malaysia, Australia and many European and Asian countries. You can signup for a free account which has an online voicemail function. If you want to make cheap calls or receive calls that can be forwarded to your landline or mobile phone, you need to register your phone and buy credit - but to receive calls to the Jaxtr voicemail can be done with the free account.

You will be alerted when you receive a voicemail by an automatically generated e-mail from Jaxtr so you can login to your account online and listen to the message. One of the advantages of a Jaxtr account is that people in other countries can call you at rates local to them. So your friends or family abroad can send you a voicemail from their phones at cheap local rates whatever time of day or night, wherever they are, without worrying about time zone differences or needing to be at computer.

The other cool thing is that you can put a Jaxtr widget on your blog or website which people can click on to initiate a call from their phone. They type in their telephone number and Jaxtr calls their phone to connect it to your voicemail line. The first call is free and then Jaxtr gives them a local number to call for subsequent calls. If they have an all inclusive package on their mobile phone or their home phone has free minutes, those subsequent calls will essentially be free for them to make.

One downside for some may be that you have to go online and listen to the messages online so you will need a broadband connection that can comfortably support audio streaming and a computer with a sound card. Another might be that while the caller may leave the message for you while they are on the fly, YOU can only pick up the message when you are at YOUR broadband-connected computer.

You can give my Jaxtr voicemail line a try on my Contact page at www.fusionview.co.uk/contact.

I also add a line in my email signature: Don’t have time to email? Send me a voicemail instead @ www.jaxtr.com/yangmayooi

The main difference between Jaxtr and the other service I’ll be explaining in a later post, Dial2do, is that the message remains as an audio message for the recipient. Also, it is an application set up by you as the recipient.

Let me know if you give this service and go - and also what you and your friends think about it’s usefulness or otherwise, whether you use it for voicemail or to make and receive calls.

BTW, I’m not commissioned by Jaxtr in any way. This is my personal view based on how useful I’ve found this service.

I used to type by pecking two-fingered at the keyboard — it was very laborious and painful, hunching over the letters with my head nodding up and down as I checked between the screen and keyboard every few seconds. Finally, I taught myself to touch type using a book from Pitman’s Secretarial College, which was a long tiresome process in itself over the course of three months. It paid off, however, as I slowly increased my typing speed over time from 20 words per minute to around 70 — 80. Touch typing helped me write my novel is easily, enabled me to do my job as a lawyer more efficiently and these days, means I can churn out e-mails, documents and blog posts very quickly. However, the downside is that spending hours on end at the computer during office hours and then in my own time in the evenings typing away means that my hands and elbows get tired and cramped. My shoulders and neck are often stiff and achey. Also, being stuck in a sitting position for long periods means that my legs and back are also badly affected.

I am guessing that this is a common experience for many people. All the discomfort that comes from having to sit and type in order to communicate on the computer takes the joy out of surfing the net and connecting with friends, doesn’t it? Well, for those of you who are fed up with typing, salvation is at hand!

I have just installed the latest speech to text software from Dragon Naturally Speaking and I am dictating this blog post while wandering around my study, occasionally standing by the window to watch the world go by. I hardly have to touch the keyboard as the program types out everything that I dictate and if I want to make an amendment, I can give it voice commands to do so for me. The version that I am using is the “Preferred” version 10 which comes with a wireless headset. It is very intuitive to use and has a huge vocabulary — it has recognised place names like Dulwich and Norwood, proper names like Joan Baez and John Steinbeck and unusual words like chorizo. I can give it voice commands to move around web pages and also control the keyboard. One of the other functions I like about it is that if I am away from my study, I can dictate into a digital recorder and then later, can next be recorded to my computer and Dragon will transcribe the audio file into text.

When you first install the program, you have to spend about 10 — 15 minutes training it to get used to your voice. Initially, it felt a bit strange “talking to” the computer and I was a bit shy! However, after a few minutes I got quite into it and now it seems the most natural thing in the world — in particular, because I use the wireless headset and tend to do my dictating while looking out of the window, it does not feel as if I am “talking to” the computer. The great thing is that I can speak at more or less a conversational pace and it is accurate upwards of 95% of the time, provided I enunciate clearly. In fact, it is much quicker for me now — one week in — to dictate than to touch type because the program is so much more accurate than my typing e.g. it doesn’t transpose letters or hit two keys at the same time!

I think to make the best use of this program, it is a good idea to have an outline in your mind of the structure and flow of your article, blog post or e-mail so that you do not have to spend much time afterwards editing and/or moving text around. Normally, I would have to do some minimal editing and rewriting just to tidy up anything that I have typed anyway, so having to do that at the end of a dictated text isn’t such a big problem — it only becomes a pain if you have to do substantial rewriting on your dictated text.

Being able to dictate text easily and accurately has really made blogging and e-mailing so much more fluid and less physically tiring. I am also more inclined to flesh out my e-mails to my friends because it doesn’t involve tiresome typing. As for blogging, it is helping me stay prolific and engaged.

So, if you are tempted to try Dragon Naturally Speaking, please do come back and let me know how you get on. (I have no association with the program or company and get no benefit from this review.)

You may have heard people say “Skype me” or “Are you on Skype?” and wondered what on earth that’s all about. Skype is the name of a company that provides a means for you to have voice conversations over the internet, using VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol - a technology that enables voice conversations to be transmitted over a data network using Internet Protocol). There are other companies that offer this service but Skype seems to have become one of the most well-known and well-used - particularly by solo professionals.

So what’s the big deal about Skype? Why not just use the good old-fashioned telephone?

Free voice calls over the internet

Skype - and other VOIP providers - offer free voice calls to other Skype users via your computer: the call is made from your computer and you need microphone and speakers plugged into your computer to use this service. You can also buy telephones that plug into your computer so you can maintain the familiar telephone interface and experience that you’re used to.

Low cost international telephone calls

The advantage of Skype, I think, is that you can also make cheap calls to landlines all over the world, using SkypeOut. You pay in some money to your SkypeOut account via your credit card and as you make calls, they take money out of your kitty and you will need to top it up from time to time. Calls to UK and USA landlines are currently 0.014p a minute - as are calls to Malaysia (where my parents live).

Call forwarding and voicemail for incoming calls

You can also use SkypeIn to get a regular telephone number which you can answer via your PC or forward to any other number eg your home or office landline or your mobile - and this comes with voicemail. You pay a sign up fee for this service and then pay for the cost of the forwarded call on a per minute basis as if it were a SkypeOut call. So for a small business or solo professional, this can be a useful feature if you want your clients to remember only one telephone number for you wherever you are. Having checked out other call-forwarding services in the UK, my view is that this is so far the most cost-effective for this kind of service.

Conference Calls

You can arrange conference calls with a number of callers - whether other Skype users or via landlines/ mobiles - using the control panel to initiate calls via your PC. This is handy for small businesses or solo professionals - but the sound quality is unfortunately not brilliant the more people you have on the call.

Text messaging

If you have SkypeOut credit, you can also use it to send text messages to any mobile phone anywhere in the world - I love this service because I can type my text message using your PC keyboard rather than fiddling with my mobile phone keys!

Chat

It’s also handy for text chatting with other Skype users - which is free as that is entirely handled over the internet, without interfacing with phones.

Practicalities

You will need a PC or laptop, of course. You will need a broadband connection - dial up connections are too slow for VOIP calls. You will need to go to the Skype website at www.skype.com and download the telephone software onto your PC or laptop - it’s an easy process and it’s free.

Even if your PC/ laptop comes with a built-in mike and speakers, it’s a good idea to get a headset mike - the sound quality deteriorates if you are using your speakers and mike on loudspeaker mode (due to feedback and echo from the loudspeaker mode). You can get headsets from around £15 in the UK, marked as Skype compatible.

You will need to download the Skype software onto your PC and/ or laptop (it’s free) and sign up to a Skype account online. Once you have the software, you can use it to access any number of accounts you / your family/ business partner may sign up on Skype - so each person can manage their own calls, rather like having separate online email accounts.

On your laptop, you can sign in to your Skype account anywhere you are in the world, via a hardwire connection or wi-fi. The same call rates as shown on their main website will apply - unlike using your mobile phone abroad, where call rates abroad are very high.

If you have a webcam, you can also make video calls - but note the issue with sound quality if your webcam works on a loudspeaker mode.

Overall View

The annoying thing about VOIP services is that you can only take advantage of free calls, generally, with other users on the same provider. Skype seems to have the advantage in that many people have signed up to it so it’s more likely that your friends, colleagues and business associates are also on Skype and you won’t have to sign up to loads of different providers in order to connect for free with different contacts.

The downside of Skype is that the quality of their voice service is sometimes unreliable - with echoing and intermittent sound break-up, especially on conference calls. So I wouldn’t rely on it entirely for all your business communication needs but it’s handy to have as a second line, for short conference calls and for use on your laptop if you travel a lot.

Overall, I use Skype regularly because I like the integrated PC and phone and messaging service - and also the cheap call rates, and many of my professional contacts as well as my friends and family use Skype.

Further resources:

Tech FAQ - what is VOIP?

Skype isn’t the only VOIP provider - you can check out other VOIP Providers (UK) here.