GTT Live: Life After Skype...What’s Your Next Phone Patch?

Well, hello everybody. George the Tech here. Just love to experiment with different platforms and different technology. So, today I'm doing something I rarely ever do, which is I'm actually doing a live stream using Zoom. So, I'm using Zoom to cast out onto Facebook Live just because. And I'm mixing it up using a wireless headset today made by Ody called the Maxwell. And so just curious to see what you guys think, if it sounds good enough to do this kind of thing or if it's too low

fidelity for you guys. Well, why am I here? What this is all about is I want

to talk about Skype and the fact that Skype is going away officially tomorrow. Now, many of you probably are thinking, Skype, when's the last time I used Skype? I can't even remember the last time I used Skype. For those of you that fall into that category, maybe this won't be that interesting to you. But what this is really about is what are you going to use to connect to your clients who still want to talk on the phone. Yeah, an actual telephone. Now, if you guys want to engage with me, I

can see your comments in the chat. So, you're more than welcome to post your your situations that you're dealing with in your studio. Maybe you are using Skype and you're frustrated that it's going away and you don't know what to do. Maybe you've dabbled with Microsoft Teams and you find it woefully inadequate. It doesn't have a way to call telephones. You don't like Teams. It's frustrating. Maybe you've tried Google Voice and it's got some

shortcomings. Maybe you've tried Zoom and you found it overly confusing and you don't like that you can't make phone calls or that you can make phone calls but it's just too overwhelming.

Well, I'll tell you what I've been trying, what I've been using for my own business for quite some time, and I'll share why I'm using it and why I think it might work well for

you. So, yes, if you're living under a rock or maybe you just haven't used Zoom for a really long time, strike that Skype for a really long time and you're thinking, "Oh my gosh, remember Skype?" Well, Skype was bought by Microsoft a number of years ago, and it was by far the number one platform for making live conversations with people around the globe. Not only could you obviously connect to other Skype users completely for free, but you could also make phone calls and receive phone calls over

Skype. And I had a Skype out phone number for many years. In fact, I believe I still do. and it's going to go away tomorrow. So, a Skype phone number or a Skype out number meant that you could have a normal telephone number with a a local area code that anybody could call into and it would just look and sound like a normal telephone call to them. So, many years later, Skype, for whatever reason, had to do an exit

and got bought by Microsoft. And at first things were okay, but then Microsoft made more and more changes to the Skype platform, adding features that none of us really wanted, taking away things or degrading other parts of the experience, over complicating it, tying your account into Microsoft really directly, making people change passwords, just kind of on and on, making it more and more irritating to

use. Then we had this little thing called the pandemic in early 2020 and Zoom had already been around for quite some time at that point and I personally had already made the move to using Zoom for doing interviews for example like we used to zoom for many many years on the voiceover body shop and east west audio body shop before that. So Zoom sort of take took over our day-to-day use of Skype. Well, that seemed to happen to more and more

people. And I don't know if it was because Zoom made it easier to have group meetings or if Zoom was a more user-friendly user interface. Whatever the case was, Zoom really started to take over. But what really was the nail in the coffin for Skype's success was the pandemic. And when the pandemic kicked in, Zoom just took over completely. They were the right place at the right time.

They had built up everything they needed to have a reliable, stable system that students and schools could use and they just basically blew away blew away the industry completely. And by the way, just so you guys know, there are live captions in Facebook. I also have live captions going in Zoom and Zoom is translating it into Spanish at the same time. So, I just found out that people not watching Zoom won't see the Spanish

captions. What a bummer. Anyway, again, trying new things here today, right? Just experimenting. It's live and it's off the cuff. So now it's Skype has been in place for a lot of my clients in their studios as a necessary tool for just patching in to their customers when they want to be on a plain old telephone pots telephone.

Whether they're calling from their office, from a boardroom, calling from their cell phone, or they're calling from home while they're making dinner and listening into your session, clients still to this day like just the simplicity of phone calls. So there are definitely alternatives to using Skype as a phone. You know, in the business world, we call it VoIP systems or voice over IP. There are countless VoIP systems out there and I've tried a number of them.

I've tried them for just testing. I've tried them for having phone calls with clients. But there's one that I have been using personally now for how long we've been using open phone probably more than three years now. Open Phone is the VoIP system that

we at George the Tech have been using for quite some time now and I've been extremely happy with open phone and I would say it would be a great replacement for people that were using Skype as a way to call and receive calls from customers. So what is open phone? So, what I could do is I could jump over to my own personal Open Phone account and I can kind of show you what it looks like. This is Open Phone.

It might look a little bit complicated at first, but all it is is it's a convenient way to be able to have one channel for your business that is also a phone a phone system for making and receiving phone calls and conversely also a great stable software platform to use as a phone patch in your recording studio. So, open phone runs in your browser. Open phone runs as an app on your mobile phone or open phone runs as a desktop

application. And on this computer, I actually do not have open phone the app installed at all. I'm only using Open Phone on this computer in Chrome and that's it. So, why open Phone? Well,

obviously Open Phone makes and receives phone calls and it does a really good job with it. It's stable. It's reliable. The sound quality is good. It has built-in recording for the phone calls. And I'll tell you why I wouldn't use that for doing interviews later. But anyway, it does inter it does record the phone calls for you, so you have a recorded record of your calls. Now, you can turn this off in case there's issues of privacy that you are concerned about, but it does do that for you.

Open phone also has a voicemail menu system. So if you want to give people the option to ring your phone or if you want to give them the option to leave a message or have other possible options for them to reach out to you, you can have an actual voicemail announcement. So, if you call our phone line 4242268528, you're going to hear our live IVR announcer that happens to be our client and very talented phone system, voice talent, Jessica Taylor, and you'll hear her voice right off the

top. Well, anybody can get this for your own system. And it just has a very professional feel so that when you do get incoming calls from clients, they're going to feel like you're not just a person, you're actually a person running a business. And that right away is something that makes it feel a little bit more professional, a little more polished, and really impresses me about Open Phone. Another thing I like about Open Phone is its texting functionality.

Not only can it te can it text messages like any other normal phone, but even what I find really important is it can set up automatic text replies that will automatically reply to text messages coming in, phone calls that come in, and you can set office hours where you're not available with a different message that appears on screen when you're not typically available or not working. I know voice actors almost never not work,

right? But if you do want to set boundaries around your hours, you can have the system automatically reply with folks, letting them know that you're not a currently available and what they could do in the meantime just so you have a the ability to give that information back. And I find that to be

incredibly incredibly helpful. It really does make it so much less stressful on me as a business owner to know that somebody calling in and missing me because I'm tied up or not I'm not I'm offline or I'm not working that they can get information back to them. That's useful actual actionable information. In our case, you'll see I'm looking right now at one of my my channels. This happens to be the notifications that come back from my website letting me know when we've

booked customers. You'll see that it sends auto replies to texts coming in that say, "Thanks for your interest in GTT. You can book the services and gives the link." And then it does list the special emergency phone number for tech support. For many of you, that may not be necessary. But maybe you have an alternative phone number that you'd prefer people to reach you on, or you have a backup phone or some other system that you want to use. Well, you can provide that phone number right there in

the auto reply. Or you just simply reply with, "Thanks for reaching out. My name is Joe Smith. You've reached my voiceover business phone line. Sorry I didn't. I'm not available. I'm going to re get back to you immediately, but go ahead and leave me a message if you need to schedule something, you know,

something like that. Also, I get a lot of people that refer folks to us through that phone number and they may not even know we have a website or we have a way to be booked and that gives them that website right away so they can take

action immediately. So, if you get an incoming call and you want someone to reach you through your website, you can give them information there, you know, saying this is where I want to be reached um and where I can be booked or here's where you can find my rate card or here's where you can see my demos, that kind of a thing. So, another thing I like about Open Phone is I like the app on the mobile phone. It works really stable. It works really well. The sound quality is

better than a normal phone call. And that really starts to become more noticeable when you start using the system actually for a phone patch. Now, phone patch is a pretty old school term. Phone patches really are referring to the days where we had a piece of equipment that would connect to the plain old telephone of your home or your

office. connect that to your handset on your desk so you can still make normal phone calls, but patch in so that the audio from the incoming phone call and the audio coming from your studio can be heard by your by heard by the coach, heard by the customer, whoever's on the other end. And so it basically turns your entire recording studio into the handset of the phone. That's what a phone patch is. They were often called phone hybrids and they have almost

completely disappeared from use. I may have a few of you customers out there that still have a phone line and use a phone hybrid to patch in a phone to your studio. I found that to be pretty much almost completely dead. So what should we do in case what should we do in place of that? Right? So this is where I think open phone is beautiful and I think the quality of open phone especially on a mobile phone really starts to shine. So if you want to use a mobile

phone as your phone patch device meaning you want to take and receive calls from a business you don't want to use your own personal f mobile phone number and you want to patch that into your studio. There are so many ways to do this. So, so, so many ways to do it. What I have found recently, and of course, I'm a little bit biased because I was developing this product myself, so I've been, what do you say, dog fooding this thing, which means when you make dog food, yes, somebody has to eat it.

You can use a device like this that allows you to easily patch your mobile phone into your recording software. And this thing does it so beautifully. This happens to be the Sentrance Passport VO. And what this does so brilliantly is it has two USB ports. I'll unplug the headphones for now. There's two USB ports on the Passport VO. One is for recording only and one is for

communications. And when you set when you plug your phone into the communications port and then your recording studio computer into the recording port, you have the ability to easily patch in your phone into your studio and let the you can hear the phone caller. You have control over the phone caller with a comms knob. And you have the ability to play back audio you've recorded and send it down the line to your your client, your coach, your podcast guest, whatever it is

you're working with. Super easy to separate the two, but combine them in perfect ways that don't create echo, cross talk, bleed, etc., etc. So, why open phone? Why not just use the regular phone app on the phone? Right? Well, the phone app on most phones, and I'm speaking now specifically for an iPhone because that's what I'm personally using, but the same may be true for Android, does run at super super low quality sample rates, like 8

kHz, right? Anybody that's recorded files for telefan work, you know what I'm talking about, right? The quality of a telephone call recording on a telefan network is really low quality. So that's because yeah, the sample rate of a phone call is very low. And that's that's just because it's built around and has a backend and a backward compatibility with a very very old plain old telephone system.

However, these newer phone apps, VOIPEs, voice over IP systems are capable of running at higher sample rates and thereby get better sound quality. But what really is important is when you're wanting to interface a proauudio piece of gear with your mobile phone and get quality audio in and out of the phone, you have to use a phone app that has a higher sample rate. The built-in phone app on an iPhone at that low sample rate will not properly communicate with many audio devices including the

passport. So in my tests when I use open phone app on my mobile phone and make and receive calls the passport VO communicates perfectly. It sounds great. The quality is fantastic and you end up with a really good resulting signal to and from your customer. And what's more, with this a device like this that's super flexible, you can actually set the record input output channel assignment switch for channel two to record what comes back from the person on the phone

call. So now you have a recording of you isolated from the recording of the person on the phone call. Now, if you're being directed, that's probably not something you're going to need very often, but it sure can be nice if you're being coached to be able to go back and listen later and have the two files, you and your coach, completely separated. So, if you want to listen to it back with their voice, you can. If you want to listen to it back without, you can.

If you want to separate out your audio for an audition, whatever. It just makes your life so much easier and so much more flexible. So, that's one reason why using a standalone VoIP app instead of the phone app on your phone may be really useful to you because interacting with Proau Audio devices can be problematic when just using the built-in phone app on the

phone. And so if you guys who are listening in at this point have any questions, comments, or input at all about what you're doing in your studio, what's not working, what you're doing in place of Skype in your own personal case. I'd love to hear it. I'd love to see what you guys yourselves are doing as you see Skype going away. So open phone is one option. Can

you use Zoom? Yes, you can. Zoom does of course provide anybody with a Zoom Pro account uh incoming phone numbers for taking incoming calls and it works fine. It's a little more clunky for the person who's calling in because it works a little bit more like calling into a conferencing line. Meaning, they first have to call a phone number that patches them into the Zoom system and then they have to enter another 10-digit number, that is your Zoom account to be patched

into your Zoom call. It works. It's just a few more hoops to jump through for the customer. It's a little more annoying. it's not the most ideal. You can also get a Zoom phone system number and actually have a Zoom the ability to make and receive actual phone calls from Zoom, but I just find their user interface not the most easy to

understand. It's a little bit clunky and I don't know, I really want those additional features like the ability to send and receive text messages directly, have autoresponses, have a voicemail system, and I find all those things are done so much better with the open phone platform. Again, I use both. I use Zoom for doing meetings, presentations, webinars, etc., etc. And I use Open Phone for whenever I want to make actual telephone calls and receive

calls with clients. And I don't seem to mind that they're two separate systems. In fact, I prefer it. It's very hard to find one platform that does all things equally well. And I just don't think that Zoom is a great telephone system. I find Open Phone really is. Open Phone is

actually pretty affordable, too. I just happened to be paying my bills today and I saw the latest open phone bill. It was for $28. $28. And that's for two phone lines, not one, two. I have one for me for me accessing my client calls and for using on my mobile. And I have another open phone line for my assistant so that she has her own way to make and receive calls and check messages and things like that. So, I'm paying for two lines and two lines only at $28 a month is pretty

amazing. And that is paying monthtomonth. I haven't checked lately Open Phones prices are if you pay upfront, you know, if you pay by the year, for example. Actually, I'm going to check right now. Yep. They do the exact same thing that every other company does that offers subscriptions. They have a month-to-month and a yearly rate. So, I'm doing starter. I'm not doing business. I'm just doing starter. It really has everything I needed to do. It has calling and messaging to US and Canadian

numbers. You can actually set up a toll-free number if that's your thing. And if you pay by the year, $180 a year, it's only $15 a month. I'm paying monthly. I think I have a little bit lower rate locked in because I've been using it for so long. So, I'm paying a little bit less than $19 per user per per month. I think I'm paying 16 or$,550, something like that. But, I'm finding it to be a really excellent deal, a really good platform, good

customer service as well. You can jump on chat or you can talk to them if you do have issues and it's proven to be really, really good. Another thing is I'll put a link down in the comments after the video posts, but they do of course as many many services do have an affiliate program, a referral program, meaning that if you do decide you want to try it, if you use my link, I get a little kick and you get a kick. And the

kick you get is even bigger. I think it gives you about $20 worth of calling credit if you sign up and use Open Phone from the link I'll provide in the description of this video. So, you might want to try it for that reason. Just get on there, try a free trial, and yes, you can also port over a phone number that you already have. So, the phone numbers on the Skype system, just because Skype is going away tomorrow, doesn't mean those Skype numbers are going to

immediately vaporize there. There should be a period of time where you're going to be able to recover and keep port over your Skype number over to another platform like Open Phone. I haven't done this personally because I haven't had a active Skype phone number for so long, or at least not one that I've been using. So, I didn't have a purpose to port it over, but Open Phone does support porting. So, you can get a phone number that you already have ported into

that system. Now, from my own personal experience, I wouldn't port my mobile number over. I like to keep my personal mobile number separated from my business phone system. I just kind of like that, you know, level of privacy and the separation of the two. If an a phone call comes in on open phone, I know it's business related. If it comes in on my mobile phone number, I know it's personal in most cases and I tend to prefer that. Right? That was my idea to

just share with you guys what I think you should do now that we're in a post Skype world. I hope you did find that somewhat helpful and informative and happy to be of help to you guys. If you would like a little bit of a handhold through this process, obviously that's what we're here for. Head over to george.te and you can check out my consulting services on there and I can walk you through getting things set up and making sure everything works seamlessly and smoothly for your

customers. And that's it. I appreciate your time today. Thanks for listening. This has been George the Tech Rip Skype. It was nice knowing you.