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For the deaf people in your life...
Nov. 8th, 2011 02:48 pmI thought I'd share this service I recently discovered: IP-Relay. It provides free phone calls on behalf of deaf people, but what rocks is that you can use an IP Relay app or even AIM to talk to an operator, who will place the call. They talk to the other person, then type out what the other person says for you.
Not only that! They even assign you a 10-digit number. Your call will appear to be coming from that number, and other people can call you and the call will appear on your AIM as an incoming chat from My IP Relay.
There are some quirks. Since it originates in the old TDD relay services, there are conventions from those days such as that you must put 'GA' at the end of each line to indicate that the other side can 'go ahead', and when you are ready to end the call, you tell the operator 'SK' (Stop Keying) or alternately, 'SKSK'. You can generally also put things you mean to say to the operator in parentheses, i.e. '(Gotta love hold music, huh?)' and the operator will summarize or narrate what she is doing on your behalf, i.e. '(pressing 1)' (for navigating phone trees).
Sadly, while looking it up on the Web, I also found out that those darned Nigerians have started using relay services to help in scamming people, pretending to be hard of hearing people. They do this so they can eliminate the Nigerian accent, through the operator. Some of these operators, being kind-hearted, have taken to calling the victims afterward to warn them that these operations may well be scams.
Not only that! They even assign you a 10-digit number. Your call will appear to be coming from that number, and other people can call you and the call will appear on your AIM as an incoming chat from My IP Relay.
There are some quirks. Since it originates in the old TDD relay services, there are conventions from those days such as that you must put 'GA' at the end of each line to indicate that the other side can 'go ahead', and when you are ready to end the call, you tell the operator 'SK' (Stop Keying) or alternately, 'SKSK'. You can generally also put things you mean to say to the operator in parentheses, i.e. '(Gotta love hold music, huh?)' and the operator will summarize or narrate what she is doing on your behalf, i.e. '(pressing 1)' (for navigating phone trees).
Sadly, while looking it up on the Web, I also found out that those darned Nigerians have started using relay services to help in scamming people, pretending to be hard of hearing people. They do this so they can eliminate the Nigerian accent, through the operator. Some of these operators, being kind-hearted, have taken to calling the victims afterward to warn them that these operations may well be scams.
