26 August 2010

Skype goodies

Just a quick post (I still need to do reviews of the Harmony 700 universal remote, Picross 3D and the Philips BDP-3100 Blu-Ray player). Since I am a journalist for various publications I use Skype all the time for conducting interviews. Text chatting is great because it means that you can copy and paste quotes directly but understandably people don't have all day to type, so I found two things to help...

The first is the excellent MP3 Skype recorder. This free bit of software does exactly what its name implies and records a conversation of any length to your hard drive in a quality that is good enough to transcribe (you can up the quality if you'd like, but you don't need to, the default is perfectly fine). Now all I need is automatic transcription software that's free and works... :D
http://voipcallrecording.com/

The second is perhaps even better. Ring2Skype gives you a real phone number in over 100 cities in the world and you can have as many as you like for nothing. The phone number costs you nothing and it means that your contacts should only have to pay for a local phone call to get to you, cutting down their costs too. In combination with the MP3 recorder it makes a perfect duo for journalists.
http://www.ring2skype.com/

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