There is a downside to this, however — a lot of the steam has gone out of the Whisper/Mumble effort.

Whisper sounds and works about as nice as Vivox does — except that it’s missing a couple of key pieces. Those include easy viewer integration and an automatic disconnect when speakers leave a region (otherwise, they can hear what people say about them behind their backs!). These two fixes — which were promised about a year and half ago — still haven’t materialized (the devs were working on other, more pressing issues).

Now, with Vivox, there’s even less motivation for anyone to finish that work up.

Plus, both Whisper and Freeswitch require that you run your own voice servers — not something everyone is willing to do!

Where it would become an issue is for large corporate and educational deployments where the institutions would prefer to run their own servers (to save money, or for regulatory compliance reasons, or to ensure maximum security, etc…).

Whisper would have been perfect for them. The sound quality is clear, there’s speaker indications, attenuation with distance, etc… it’s really nice.

Now that I think about it, I understand better what’s going on, and I don’t feel like I’m abusing their service. Getting a Vivox account is not that different from getting, say, a Skype account. Skype is also free for basic use. OK, it’s a little different, because these Vivox accounts enable conversations between people who don’t have Vivox accounts, but that’s just a technicality.

This is such a nice gesture, that if ever they want to turn me into a paying costumer, I’ll gladly do it (for a reasonable fee).

I highly encourage everyone with a small world to get in touch with them and get an account.