Proud Geek

The hugely popular Skype service has pretty much left the deaf community behind because, well, its primary service is low-cost or free voice communications over the Internet. Its video chat quality isn’t up to par (at least when I tested it several months ago), and so I quickly stopped using Skype. But that hasn’t stopped many hearies from signing up for Skype — and using its voice communication services (much like a telephone) over the Internet. Some cell phones are even beginning to allow Skype voice services whereever WiFi is available — saves a lot on caller minutes.

But now there’s a reason for deaf folks to have a Skype account. Skype has paired up with Spinvox (which I briefly wrote about several months ago) to convert voicemail on Skype accounts to text messages (otherwise known as SMS) that can then be sent to any cellphone.

This could be an useful pairing for us deafies. If you’ve got hearing family members who use Skype for low-cost or free voice communications through the Internet, now they can call your Skype account and leave a voice message for you. The voice message will then be converted to text and sent to your Sidekick or Blackberry (or Treo if you’re lucky and geeky enough to have one) as a SMS message.

If you do this, let us know in the comments what you think of this service.

(Thanks, Download Squad!)