VOIP Applications

Voice over Internet Protocol technology, or VOIP, has radically changed the traditional idea of what we consider a telephone to be, and has opened up the potential for many innovative VOIP applications which can add convenience or additional power to our voice communications.

Original phone calls were relatively simple, the voice on each of the call is captured by a microphone and converted into rapidly changing voltages which are then used to reproduce the voice at the other end of the call using a speaker.  This is a straightforward arrangement, but it's also limiting in it's simplicity because other information beside the voice may be difficult to send.  VOIP changed all of this by encoding each voice in a stream of digital packets which are sent over the internet and then reconstructed back into the voice at the termination of the call.  Since, the voice is being converted into generic internet packets which are sent back and forth between both ends of the call, there's no reason why other internet packets containing additional information cannot also be sent along side.  This allows convenient VOIP applications like caller ID and call waiting that we have all grown used to.  It can also power more advanced applications like browsing your company's phone directory using the screen on your phone or showing a photo of the person you are calling on the phone itself.

Since VOIP is digital, a computer can also become a VOIP phone which allows a variety of VOIP applications to run on your computer.  Called a soft phone, a computer application can actually place phone calls across the internet to other computers or even to real phones around the world.  Many consumers use this in the form of Skype which allows you to call any other computer using Skype around the world for free, or to place calls to real phones around the world at drastically reduced prices compared to traditional long distance costs.  Many companies use a VOIP application in their call centers so that technical support and customer service agents are placing and receiving calls through their computers instead of through normal phones.  This can save a lot of money, and also allows calls to be carefully routed to the right people through computer software designed for the task. 

Since VOIP applications are really just one computer device talking to another, there is a lot of room for innovation in the future that's hard for us to envision now.  Videophones have been the subject of future speculation since the original invention of the telephone and now IP technology has made them a reality.  There's many more new applications just waiting to be thought of and created to use the new horizons made possible by VOIP.