Well I arrived in Tallinn around 2am on Thursday morning.
The flight was delayed by 2 hours to begin with, then as we were taxing for take off one of the passengers panicked and wasn’t able to fly. So we had to return to the stand, let the passenger off and unload the passenger’s bags adding another hour to the journey.

Apparently on the passengers inbound flight there had been some extreme turbulence and the passenger was still shaken up from the experience and wasn’t ready to fly again just yet.

I have been lucky and never experienced really bad turbulence on a flight, I can only imagine that it is terrifying so I feel for the guy.

I finally fell into bed around 3am and up again at 7am ready for a series of meetings. As you can imagine I have been pretty tired since.

You will have seen that we announced the Voice Services Program to expose IVR applications to the Skype’s global user base.

IVR applications (Interactive Voice Response) applications are typically written with Voice XML (VXML) or Speech Application Language Tags (SALT). VXML and SALT allow you to expose functionality by voice interaction by speaking your request, or by pressing buttons on your phone to respond to questions (press 1 for accounts, press 2 for sales).

Increasingly we have seen more and more systems that allow you to interact with them via voice, so rather than pressing 1, 2, or 3 to indicate your choice you can just say, “I want to speak to the sales department” and the system will act on your request. These voice systems can be very complex and allow the user to do powerful things. Book travel, sell shares etc without having to speak to an agent in a call centre.

The Voice Services Program opens up these services to Skype, meaning you can “callto:” a Skype name that is voice enabled and speak to the system to get the information you are after.

Try tellmeonskype here to get a flavour of what you can do.

If you have an IVR system, or are thinking about developing one to expose though Skype, there are 2 models available for making money from your service:

• Free services: these are free for the Skype caller. As a content provider, you will pay a small per minute fee for receiving these calls.

• Chargeable services: callers will pay per minute from their Skype Credit. As a content provider you will receive a share of call revenue

Charging for your services is entirely up to you define the per-minute charge to callers. You receive a percentage of the call revenue, so the more users that call your service, and the longer they call, the more money you make. It’s that easy!

For more information on the Voice Services Program go here: Skype voice program.