I have recommended the following service to a few people already so I thought I’d write a blog entry about it as well. One of the motivating factors is to document how one unsubscribes from the paid service as it took me a while to figure that out and I want to save others time in the future (and myself, in case I ever sign up for it again, which is possible given my good experiences with it).

The Gizmo Project is a Voice-over-IP service like many others such as Skype. There are a few particularly nice features about it, however, that made me pick it over others for a research project I was conducting recently.

First, Gizmo lets you record conversations you are having on the computer with others. This is extremely useful for research purposes. When you press “record”, the service does mention this to the other party so it is not done in secret. Of course, for research purposes, the action of recording a respondent’s comments should be stated up front clearly anyway and permission must be granted by the person who is being recorded. But that part is not up to the technology.

A second nice feature is that it is possible to sign up for a local phone number all over the US (and some other countries). This was very useful recently when I was doing a study in another state and wanted potential respondents to have a local number they could call when trying to reach me. This service is just $4/month.

Once you have the new phone number, you can specify another number to which you would like to have it forwarded. This can be a landline or a cell phone.

The service also comes with the very nice additional feature of having your voice mail messages sent to you on email in small wav files. This is great. First, you get to keep an easily accessible copy of the message (that is, you don’t have to go through the other messages in your voicemail looking for the particular one you need). Second, you can listen to the messages without using up cell phone minutes.

How to unsubscribe from Gizmo Project?

The tricky part came when I wanted to unsubscribe. Since I am done with the project, I no longer need a 609 phone number. I kept looking around in Gizmo to see where I could do that. However, the phone number service was through another company, CallWave. And it turns out that unsurprisingly, it is through that service that one terminates the phone number account. Aha. At that point it was easy. But this one step was not completely straight forward. For future reference, the original email from CallWave Billing did include a link to the site where one logs in and unsubscribes. So the key here was remembering that the service was through CallWave not through the Gizmo Project.

Overall, I had a really good experience with this service and recommend it. (No, I am in no way affiliated with these companies and get no benefit from having others sign up.)

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