I just received this E-mail from Skype.
I ened up with a Skype telephone number because I needed, and still do, a US telephone number. This just came out of the blue and is just a touch over one month notice. So, I think I need to quickly find a replacement for this service. Any suggestions?
I believe you can get a US based phone number through Google Voice, no?
Microsoft wants Skype users to transition to Teams:
I thought Google Voice was only for the contiguous United States - not even Hawaii or Alaska.
ETA: Worth looking at,
If you’re in the US, you can choose your own number.
Ergo, if you aren’t in the U.S., presumably you can still use it. But I don’t know if you get a “U.S.” number.
~Max
The death of Skype was sealed when Microsoft released MS Teams in 2017.
Voip.ms is a few $ a month and should be able to port in your Skype number.
I’m in China, so I prefer using something which is reliable here. Using a VPN does not guarantee the Google product will work.
Skype seems to have been a multi-faceted suite of services. The only thing I’ve ever used it for is point-to-point conversations, kinda like the telephone only with video. Not sure what’s out there that is free and can do that. Zoom has a free version but it’s oriented to meetings (up to 100 participants – I only need two!) and limited to 40 minutes per session for the free version.
I took vocal lessons from a coach using Skype. It was expensive and I quit after 8 months. She was fully booked all day. She had clients all across the World.
A lot of similar businesses and their clients must be scrambling to learn a new platform.
I’d completely forgotten about my KeepCalling account. My wife has been using it occasionally. Let’s hope this account doesn’t disappear too.
Well, the OP needed a phone number, which was a pretty special feature of Skype.
If you just need video calling over the internet, there’s a lot that can do that (Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Apple FaceTime, etc.) Meta might have one too, not sure.
Thanks, I’ll check those out, though the very names “Google Meet” and “Microsoft Teams” suggest multi-point business teleconferencing. I just want to be able to chat with a friend or two once in a while using voice and video with a videocam perched atop my monitor. Whatever its other use cases, Skype did that particular function really well.
I agree with you! I miss Skype and hate Microsoft Teams with a burning passion. I don’t have an iPhone, so FaceTime is useless. Google Meet is pretty good, IMO, and a frequent “good enough” common ground for people who don’t have particular devices and don’t want to pay for video calls.
And yes, those tools are meeting-focused, but I do also frequently use them for 1-on-1 chats. Unlike Zoom, Google Meet’s time limit is 24 hours for 1-on-1 calls (60 min for 3+ participants unless you’re on the paid plan). I use it frequently to meet with customers, but my girlfriend also takes her guitar lessons over Meet. It’s also nice that it just uses your Gmail account (which everyone has), while nobody I know has a Microsoft account anymore, or wants to create yet another one at some other provider just to chat with one friend once in a while.
Edit: I think Facebook Messenger (do people still use that?) and Slack and Discord also have video calling, if those are better options. They’re more DM-focused, but can also handle small meetings.
Google Meet might be the answer for the moment.
I wonder if there’s a business opportunity here to enable simple point-to-point video calling. To the obvious reply that everybody and his dog is familiar with video teleconferencing, I say that all of these technologies seem to have mutated into needless complexity.
It’s like the photo viewer software that I have. It displays photos. In virtually any standard format. It lets you move forward, backward, browse, delete, resize, re-orient, zoom in or out, etc. It’s a photo viewer.
It’s also Version 1.0, dating back to the era of Windows NT 4. It’s still in existence, but I had a look at the current version. It’s now an unrecognizable bloated monstrosity that can do 9469939883754883954353 different things, virtually none of which any ordinary person wants or needs.
This seems to me to perfectly describe the phenomenon of enshittification.
Yep, it’s all over. I have had two different commercial software programs whose updates broke the UI so badly that I wrote them and said “I want the old one back”. In both cases they provided a link without comment, leading me to conclude that I wasn’t the first.
As for Skype, this may or may not be useful info, but Teams is built on top of Skype, and does have the capability of having a real phone# associated with an account. So that may be the path of least resistance.
I can’t say I’m sorry to see Skype go: Microsoft borked the UI so badly a few years ago that it became basically unusable (well, what was a few keystrokes became many, so I found myself avoiding it) and I dropped my Skype-to-landline subscription.
I do not know if it’s a standard feature of Teams, but I have a work phone number assigned to me by my employer, which seems to only accessible (to me, as a “recipient” of calls) through Teams. The ad agency where I work no longer has assigned desks/offices, or physical phones, for anyone.
Yeah, I’m in the same boat. I’m looking at my options as well and haven’t found anything easy, yet.
Skype was perfect for me. I mainly use SkypeOut, a feature which lets you call from your computer or the Skype app to regular phone numbers. I have a number of friends and family that prefer calls on their landlines.
I had a US number for $2.99 a month and unlimited calls to US number for another $2.99 a month. For less than $6, I could talk to my friends and family for as long as I wanted.
It looks like there are other options, but unfortunately, nothing this cheap.
It doesn’t let me set up an account from Japan to even get started.
That doesn’t work from computers or an app, does it?
This really pisses me off. Microsoft spent something like 8 billion dollars for it, didn’t really help it and then killed it off with something that doesn’t work for a lot of people.
I haven’t had the same experience.
I use my iPhone app and doesn’t take any more keystrokes than regular calling. Well, you have to select the country by name rather than input the country code, but it’s still really easy.
It looks like the interface on the computer doesn’t let you use the keypad so that would be annoying, but I’ve always used my iPhone so I never noticed.
Ah, I meant on Windows.
Yeah, why don’t they let you call using the number pad? That can’t be that hard to implement.