Matt Webb on Skype

Matt Webb, co-author of Mind Hacks, on Skype Prime:

Skype Prime is included in the new Skype 3.1 beta on Windows. Skype Prime allows you to charge a one-off or per-minute fee for people to call you. Perfect for premium rate voice services. But what else does it enable? I've talked about Skype as a platform before. What automated voice services could be built--perhaps, simply, a voicemail system as a front-end to a dictation service? It could work like this: You call a number, which happens to be running on Skype. You pay a per-minute charge, and dictate a message. The call is recorded and when you hang up, the mp3 is pushed to Mechanical Turk for transcription. The text is emailed back to you. Of course there's no reason this couldn't be done with Asterisk or some other transcription service, but the advantages here are: Skype has micropayments built in; you can run it from a desktop machine; the technology makes it easier to prototype so you can concentrate on the experience.