I’ve been messing around with a program called Skype. I used MSN Messenger for the first time in years last night and my brother msn’ed me to chat. He has a webcam so he was trying to get it to work.
I have a microphone and he has a webcam with built-in microphone. It wouldn’t work right though – I could see him and he could hear me but I couldn’t hear him. He couldn’t see me as I don’t have a webcam.
Anyway, someone told him about Skype. I’d heard about it but had no reason to use it. So tonight we tried it and it’s really good. It’s a completely free chat/video calling program. You can also ‘phone’ landlines at a cheaper rate if you buy Skype credit but i have no use for that. For pc to pc calls its excellent.
I can see my brother via video and hear him and he can hear me. I might get a webcam tomorrow so he can see me too. It’s great fun. There’s also a chat thing like MSN where you can type and send files and emoticons. You can also search for people, strangers and friends alike, and invite them to talk to you, and you can have conferences for upto 5 people, albeit without video as we found out (we tried calling random Americans but they snubbed us, lol)
It is a bit strange though, i’m kind of glad i don’t have a webcam as the thought of a stranger seeing my face is a bit up close and personal. I know chat rooms have enabled voice for long enough but I always thought it used voice synthesisers? I don’t know. Seems a bit freaky to talk in your real voice, lol, but still it’s amazing that technology can allow us to talk to people virtually anywhere on the planet.
