After a spotty RedMonk stand-up meeting call this morning with all 3 of us, Steve and I just tried out Gizmo. It seems quite nice, and definitly more featureful than Skype.
We did cut out a couple times on both ends — but it was a delay instead of a complete drop of content. Recording was super-easy too: just click record, and it dumps a WAV in a directory. That’s much easier than the usual combo of programs I use to record Skype calls.
The conference option is slightly more complex, but gives you a “normal” phone number for people to call into. That is, we could start doing more podcast recordings and just give out a normal conference phone number for guests (or ourselves when we’re away from a computer) to call into.
As someone who spends a lot of time futzing with getting podcast recording setup, both of these things are huge for me.
More importantly, the potential for making my voice-life easier and more inline with the rest of my online life makes me suddenly extremely interested in SIP and Asterisk. As you may have heard me complaining in 4-letter word tirades before, I really dislike American telcos: their innovation rate seems shockingly slow and their lock-everything-down mentality is anathema to, well, how I think things should be done.
I’ll have to use it for several weeks before I can make a real judgement about it, but so far, it seems pretty cool. And check out the Adium integrations. OS X screenshots on the front page, Adium integration…it’s as if Gizmo is after my heart ;>
yes and stephen is sure to be hanging out for use on the old nokia 770.
keep me posted cote'. i'm keenly interested in gizmo but haven't had a chance to try it out yet. how is the sound quality of the recording? also let me know if you get asterix running. playing around with that as well. if you come across services that host asterix and voip for you as well i'd love to hear it. i've heard there's a few decent ones.
James: Gizmo for gizmo…
Andre: Steve and I tried out a sample of recording, and the quality was good. That said, we still need to do a "real" test of recording for 60-90 minutes with 2-4 people.
But, the free conference land-line number is already making me think it's well worth using.
What are the Asterisks services you've heard about?