Disruptive Telephony

Back on Sunday, Dustin Trammell wrote about the "lie detector for Skype" over on the Voice of VOIPSA blog, and I have to say that this certainly is a curious use of the Skype API. Real Geek has another writeup along with the picture to the right. Blogs, of course, have been writing about it. Naturally, Gizmodo and Engadget weighed in. However, even though it is theoretically available from the Skype Extras Gallery, I'm not seeing people actually writing about using it. In the comments area of that page on Skype's site, I mostly see people expressing their frustration with trying to install it. It's strange, I was able to get to the kishkish website the other day, but not today. Perhaps they are a victim of their own success. I did notice that they had cute marketing with their use of a snippet of video of former US President Bill Clinton talking about Monica Lewinsky. It's unclear about pricing, though... it seems to be free from the Skype Extras page but the Gizmodo article references a $49.95 annual fee. Hmmmm....

Call me skeptical... voice stress analysis has been around for a long time and, well, just consider me skeptical. Oh, sure, I'll give it a try, but I don't hold out any great hope. Of course, right now when I tried to download it I can't seem to get it to run. (Which also seems to be a problem others are having.) However, I may have a larger issue in that the "Do More" link in my Skype 3.0 is greyed out, so perhaps I messed something up in my tinkering with it a couple of weeks ago (although I've since upgraded to the released version of 3.0).

In any event, regardless of whether this works or not, it certainly is a fun little example of what can potentially be done by developers given access to an API...

Technorati Tags: kishkish, skype