Voxli (YC W09) Targets Gamers With Browser-Based Group Voice Chat
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1. Latency and quality. These factors affect whether other players can hear you in time, and whether they can understand what they heard. These are very important for fast-paced situations where you can't afford to repeat yourself, a simple example being arena combat in WoW. Ventrilo is almost always used over Teamspeak for these situations. These sort of high-tension situations rarely have more than ~40 people involved, since once a group reaches a certain size the latency of the entire groups' action becomes higher than the latency of any voice chat.
2. Management. Can you mute people who are causing problems? Can you have a "commander-only" voice system to communicate between a few people in a channel without the others hearing? Can you kick people and ban spies? Is this all easy to do?
3. Scale. While Ventrilo is widely used in WoW, Teamspeak is used in EVE Online almost exclusively. Why? The reason is scale--there are often fleets of 100, 200, 500, or more players and the voice chat system needs to handle at the minimum a broadcast from a single commander to all of them.
Without the appropriate level of effectiveness in these categories, you won't be able to compete with existing apps.
Also, there is no background noise, so it's difficult to know if the program is working at all if nobody is talking (like in the HN room).
Furthermore, pushing the push-to-talk button causes behaviour I don't understand. The button pops up, then disappears again. What does that mean? Is it now on? I can't tell.
And finally, clicking the "Add room" button causes a strange message about the room that is not clear at all what it means. Am I now in multiple rooms? Do I own the room? If so, where is the list of rooms I'm in.
We require an install program because gamers require push-to-talk outside the browser. This cannot be accomplished with any amount of Javascript or Flash coding. The only way to break out of the browser sandbox is to write a piece of native code and install it as a browser plugin. This is why we have separate mac and windows plugins, for instance.
I agree that the MSI is pretty annoying. I don't really like to install random binaries either. At the end of the install, the browser should take you into your room without any user interaction -- which is why we don't show a "install done" dialog. But as it is confusing and not how most other apps do it, we'll look into making it more clear. The only other alternative for Windows was to use the Mozilla plugin installer as we do on Mac -- but that requires a browser restart and it was very confusing to users in our user tests. Overall I agree our install process has a lot of room for improvement and continued user feedback such as yours will help us refine it going forward.
You must hold down the push to talk button to talk. While you are holding it down, it says "ON AIR" and shows the waveform of your microphone recording. Agreed, we should probably add some help text to say that it is a push-hold button like a walkie-talkie and not a toggle button you click once.
If you want background noise, just click the 'always on' checkbox and the mic will stay on, giving you all the background noise you want. We don't default to this state because we are tailored for large groups. The background noise from 20 people would be pretty distracting, so we default to radio silence. Sometimes we think of it more as a walkie-talkie system for groups than a conference call.
The "Add Rooms" feature is definitely a work-in-progress. To clarify, people who aren't in the same "room" can't hear each other. This way, large gaming guilds can all be in the same channel and know who's online and what's going on, but still be broken up into smaller teams for communicating on specific tasks. One way we are working on improving this feature is to allow string names for rooms: for example, "PVP Group 1" or "Room for Bored People" instead of just a number. Also, you can only be in one room per browser tab. If you want to be in multiple rooms, open another tab to the same page.
Thanks again for the feedback! Seems I should start a FAQ on the website, or maybe add some help tips to the interface.
World of Warcraft has voice chat built right in to the game but no one uses it. You would think Blizzard doing voice chat would wipe out third party competitors; the precise opposite is true.
Also, dealing with whiny teenage gamers as users is enough to make anyone want to kill themselves. Exhibit A: the WoW forums, which are actually stupider than YouTube comments.
If the hotkey could be restricted to work only when the window/tab is active, I can see several people using it to communicate within an office environment (or for remote teams).
Frankly that will countless IM pings or having to walk to the next office.
voxli popped by firefox cherry.
You are using flash. Can you please use SwfObject, so users with high security in their browsers, don't have to click on the flash to activate it? I hope you understand what I mean.
SwfObject project is here: http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: I am using Internet explorer 7, on windows XP.
EDIT: [It works fine in Google Chrome, whatever... maybe the problem happens because you move the user to https link? I am not sure, but could this be a reason?]