VoIP + Home Businesses

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a pretty chatty person. It stands me in good stead because I almost never run out of things to write about, except when I’m overly busy. It also actually works for me, if I control myself, when I conduct interviews. Back when I ran my own print magazine, I did up to a half-dozen interviews monthly. Now, as a blogger, I’m finding an increasing number of interview requests coming in. If this were ten years ago, I’d turn them down, as transcribing recorded interviews is a serious amount of work.

But the beautiful thing about VoIP is that, since it quantizes voice, a recorded conversation is not only easy to capture, but with the right application, it can easily be converted into text. Voila, instant typed notes, from which I can pick and choose. Sure, it may require some revision after the conversion, but it’s still a boon to a busy problogger like myself.

Even VoIP by itself, without speech-to-text conversion, is a downright necessity for me. My thyroid problem seriously affects my short-term memory. Conducting an interview without VoIP, i.e., on my cell phone, as I’ve had no landline for many years, would be an utter waste of time because I’d just forget everything almost immediately afterwards. It’s a symptom of hypothyroidism. For me, VoIP is a downright necessity.

And with desktop sharing solutions like Unyte, which plugins into Skype, is great for when I want to run a quick training session with some of my contributing writers. They don’t even need to download the software - though they do need Skype 2.0+. Which is a good thing because of the few people I communicate with regularly, even daily, most don’t want/ have anything other than Skype or Google Talk. Though a condition of working for me is to have either, preferably Skype. When I conduct interviews with my contacts at VoIP development companies, most of them have selected Skype over SightSpeed, though that’s probably more a matter of Skype’s several year advantage.

Either way, VoIP is an essential part of my blogging, which I now do full-time. A quick survey of my other home-based business ideas, including tutoring or English lessons, shows me that I would need VoIP for them to operate efficiently as well, even video calling. (It’d also be a boon to telecommuters.) The only problem is getting more people that I interact with to use VoIP, particularly soft clients.