Skype TouchTone Recognition Issues & A Suggestion for a Neat Feature

Yow-Hann Lee — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:20:00 GMT

On the eve before Skype begins to charge for PC-to-Phone calls, I would like to highlight one particular issue in Skype. For the most part, the user experience has been satisfactory; however, the lower voice quality and latency experienced in PC-to-Phone calls is evidentlly greater than PC-to-PC calls. Nevertheless, I will not focus my attention on these areas.

Instead, this is more of a disclaimer for people who are interested in using Skype to contact centers with automated touchtone response systems. A long time ago, the telecom industry came up with the standard tones for touchtone telephones. Prior to that, there were rotary phones where signals are identified by the length of each dial. Today, both standards are supported. If you still use a rotary phone, however, you will be unable to contact those automated centers.

Unfortunately, Skype currently behaves more similarly to a rotary phone due to problems with automated centers being able to recognize the touchtones. I came across this entry back in 2005 highlighting the touchtone issues. A year later, I am somewhat surprised as it seems that this problem still exists as I have experienced it first hand on several ocassions. I have attempted different setups with components that are within my own control. I came across a forum post at the Skype site highlighting a bug with the touchtones in Skype versions prior to 2.5.0.82. However, my version of Skype is newer than this.

In any case, I assume this problem will be addressed with enough feedback to Skype on this.

FEATURE:

In the meantime, I would like to make a suggestion for a feature. Currently, you will only hear tones in Skype during your call if you click on one of the dial numbers in the "Dial" tab. However, I would like to suggest that it also be possible to generate the tones based on keyboard inputs. Additionally, the textbox in the "Dial" tab currently does not map letters to numbers (i.e. wyz = 9). It would be helpful to handle for this scenario where numbers are represented by letters.

Both of these are minor UI features/usability issues that would demonstrate attention to detail in a product.

COMPETITION

As an aside, I am interested in checking out Gizmo Project to compare the quality. If you've had experience with these or any other voice chat systems, feel free to post your comments.

Happy New Year! Hope it will be a great 2007 for you.

Skype Issues

Yow-Hann Lee — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 03:38:00 GMT

I was a fan of Skype until I encountered some serious issues. Approx 15 minutes into a video chat, I was experiencing some major performance problems.

As shown in the above screenshot, surely enough, Skype was consuming over 50% of my CPU. Meanwhile, the individual I was conversing with also had similar issues. However, while program crashed shortly afterwards, the person on the other end had no such problems. I haven't used Skype since the incident yesterday. I am still at a loss for how to remedy this. Turning off the video and limiting it to audio seemed to have helped the situation somewhat.

A quick search on this topic resulted in a few good troubleshooting tips: here, here and on their official site. Guess this has always been a limitation of the software since it dates back to 2003. This forum thread got me thinking about trying out JaJah.