Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

One thing missing from Skype is the ability to record calls.

As a journalist, I often need to make recordings of phone interviews - and getting them on my PC in digital format makes it easier to transcribe interviews (and hopefully soon, to search them). I have a small Sony recorder, but that uses a proprietary variant of ATRAC, and you need their software. It'll plug into a phone line, with a bit of kit from Maplin, but the recording quality, err, sucks. This device from Olympus looks good for the future, but I need something now!

Luckily, while doing some research for my Office column, I came across an Outlook plug-in called Skylook that not only integrates your Outlook address book with your Skype address book, so you can call people using Skype Out or Skype-to-Skype, but also records conversations as MP3s, ready for archiving and editing. There's even a built-in answerphone that adds calls to an Outlook folder. Microsoft may have made a splash earlier in the week with their unified messaging announcements, but Skylook's there already. Tie it in with the Skype-Salesforce.com integration and you've got a very interesting set of CRM tools...

The recording quality is good, and the size of the resulting MP3 isn't too bad either. Skylook's a rather useful piece of code. Businesses can use the recordings as part of any compliance procedure, while the rest of us can quickly turn them into podcasts (or should that be "skypecasts"?).

There's a 14 day trial, and the final registration cost isn't too bad either. A nice bit of code from our Aussie cousins...