My phone is broken and I have some important calls to make/receive over the next few weeks.
Is there anything that’ll allow me to cheaply call someone from my computer (via VOIP), type text, and have it spoken aloud to the other person in real time? They would still talk normally with their voice and I’ll be listening with my headphones.
I know there are online TTY services available for the mute, but I don’t want to abuse a service meant for truly handicapped people and waste operators’ time. That was fun for prank calling, but not so much for use on a regular basis.
Are there any Skype plugins, VOIP websites, or similar that do this?
I should add that I thought about using a regular text to speech program in conjunction with Wave Out Mix / Stereo Mix (Windows’s internal recording capability), but my sound card doesn’t let me do that
I have no idea how, but it is possible. Last year a friend texted me on my land line a few times (she thought she was texting my cell), and I got Steven Hawking speaking to me. But I believe it was a function of her carrier that allowed this. I tried it with my own cell and got nothing.
Im not following. If these are important phone calls then why arent you spending 5 dollars on a microphone and using skype or another free or low cost VOIP solution?
Regarless, theres an app called morphvox that changes your voice but also has a plugin for text to speech
The short answer is “it’s complicated”. I should’ve just said “pretend I’m mute”.
The long answer is:
I have my old phone number on my resume and the only way I can use that and not give everyone a temporary phone number is via Call Forwarding. But Call Forwarding still takes up minutes and I’m quickly running out for the month.
I still receive voicemail on the phone, but I can check it for cheap/free and then call them back on Skype without using additional cellular airtime.
However, I don’t have regular internet access at the moment and I can only go online at coffee shops, where the connection is spotty and the background noise is extreme. I can hear the other party just fine but they usually cannot understand a word I’m saying.
So, ideally, they would speak to me and I would type back to them out loud.
To answer my own question, I updated my sound card driver and I now have a Stereo Mix input, so once I find a standard text-to-speech program I can simply use that with Skype.
I have to agree. If these are employer calls, don’t put yourself behind the 8-ball by doing anything that’s going to throw them for a loop. Perhaps I’m not getting it (obvs, I’m not getting it), but why can’t you get a new, cheap cell phone (you mentioned v/m and minutes, so I can only assume it’s a cell) and swap your SIM card. Then your resume phone number will ring that phone.
I just worry that this “I’ll get a robot to do the talking” is going to land you in “weirdo we don’t need working for us” territory.
Hah, good point. I’ve just been calling friends so far with brief messages to “Talk to me on Facebook / AIM / etc.”. I didn’t put two and two together and think about actually calling someone important I’ll definitely try to find a real phone to call them with, but out of idle curiosity I’d still like to find a way to do what I mentioned in the OP.
There are so many situations where it might come in handy – prank calls, pledges of silence, classrooms, colds, accidental ingestion of sulfuric acid, etc.
And as for why I don’ t just fix the phone, I can’t afford to. It’s out of warranty and under contract and there are no Verizon phones on the Craigslist in my area.
It occurs to me that those of us who are over 40 presumed the OP was talking about his land line phone being broken, when he doesn’t actually have one. He put his cell number on his resume and can’t receive calls there, just VM.
