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To: ahhaha who wrote (23091)	6/10/2000 10:08:00 AM
From: Educator	Respond to of 29970

"voice chat". Can anyone give me an assessment of it? Hi Ah- Excite voice chat has been around for some time. I believe it has been over a year. Excite was the first portal to offer this service. The quality is so so. I have not visited their voice chat rooms in many months, maybe even a year. It is possible that they have improved on the service. My dad, brother, and I used to set up a private voice chat room. We would give it a name and meet at a specified time. It worked pretty well, and who could complain about it being free? I prefer telephony. I can dial (using dialpad.com) my dad on my computer. He then answers via his telephone. The quality there (computer to telephone) is much better than voice chat (computer to computer). It does work BEST with a cable connection. People trying to initiate communication with dialup have more interference (for lack of a better term). Now, people I call say that they get an echo of their voice. That is a minor downside. It is a little nuisance for them. Soooo, all you need is a computer, microphone, Internet connection and you can register for free at dialpad.com. There are probably other services out there. I need to pick up a headset of some sort for my computer. It would be easier than speaking loudly in the microphone. Dialpad recommends the use of a headset. It is kind of fun and worth a try. With your high speed connection, you should be all set. Good luck, Ed

To: ahhaha who wrote (23091)	6/10/2000 12:19:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 29970

It's been working, I thought, for quite some time. I used voice chat about six months ago on Excite. As one might expect, during periods of quiet, with only a few folks on the same channel, it's entertaining. During peak periods not so serene. Private chats can be created, and those are better from a contention point of view, but using private channel chat for a "scheduled" form of long distance phone calling can be extremely tenuous (not something you want to do with a customer, unless they are into IP hobbying), because of the unpredictability of congestion along the routes that get you to where you want to be. There is always the reminder that you are using something new, btw. The artifacts of ip voice are always present. Stepping on each other, echo.. long delays, and some weird sounding gurgles from time to time. But like I said, I found it always entertaining. Using a pair of speakers or headphone and a microphone reminded me very much of my early days in Ham Radio, which was one of the few things that helped me to get through puberty, as I recall ;-) You have to (re-)learn a push-to-talk paradigm with thumb coordinated with brain, ears and tongue, ready to press down on the control key eveytime it's your turn to speak... We've had voip gateways piloting in our offices going back to October of '97, when we served as a host site for a Wall Street debut for one vendor (as a courtesy, stemming from a personal relationship from within our firm). These are/were of the type that use the Internet and Private IP clouds (think ITXC) in conjunction with local class 5 siwtching. This Excite copy is not of that genre, nor does it compare in features or quality.. yet.

To: ahhaha who wrote (23091)	6/10/2000 12:55:00 PM
From: FR1	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Ah - the responses you are hearing are very interesting (and important). I have exactly the same profile. I tried it (a year ago), thought it was interesting, and have not used it since then. A few points: 1) When you come to SI you are "ready to go". All you have to do is start typing. With voice chat, you have to plug in a mike, hope it does not get feedback from your speakers, etc. - in short, more hassle. 2) In the general chat rooms I went to, it was like walking into a bar. You really did get more of a "feel" as to what somebody was like by hearing their voice but the feel you got was not all that great. When people type, they get a chance to think and clear up their statements. When you talk it is like shooting from the hip. So there was a lot of bar room "I am a bigger man than you" chatter. 3) The plus side was that transmissions were much faster (you get more said in a shorter period of time) and they were thinking of adding web cam pictures to the mix. I walked away saying, "yeah, that was interesting, I gotta go back sometime." - but I never did. And the fact that the first three respondents to your question had the same feeling must say something. *********************** While I got you here, what do you think of the Chello talks and their parent UPC?