Upgrade Voice to WebRTC
in progress
Signal Linden
We're working on upgrading Second Life’s voice system from to WebRTC, bringing better audio quality, noise cancellation, and automatic gain control while also enabling voice on mobile clients.
Why the Change?
- Our current Vivox implementation is outdated and lacks modern audio enhancements.
- WebRTC will improve voice clarity, spatialization, and performance across devices.
What’s Changing?
- Spatial Voice: We’ll use open-source solutions to maintain and enhance spatialized audio.
- Group & P2P Voice: A new server infrastructure will support these features.
- New Features: Improved voice clarity, better volume management, and potential for enhancements like reverb effects in certain regions.
What to Expect?
- Viewer Update Required: Upgrading to WebRTC will require an updated viewer.
- Better voice experience: Lower latency, clearer audio, and improved support across devices.
We’re finalizing the technical details and transition plan—stay tuned for more updates!
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VenKellie Resident
any update on this work? Vivox is really starting to become unstable, i keep losing my voice dot as well as my friends.
Signal Linden
in progress
Kassina Wylie
I thought we had already started the process... A few months ago we started having issues where we don't have our Voice Dots and Sound for like 2+ mins every time we Rez in or Teleport.
Annryk Resident
I hope that by the time we fully switch to this service, the incompatibility with sound cards will be fixed Sound Blaster AE. Otherwise I will be left without voice:/
Hadet Sonnenkern
Annryk Resident This sounds like a Windows soundmixer problem. I've had no problems with soundcards or external DACs on anything on Linux or MacOS. You can't select your sound card from the dropdown menu?
Annryk Resident
Hadet Sonnenkern The problem is not in the mixer, in the viewer the input and output of the sound card is displayed correctly and can be selected, but there is no sound at all, I only see how others speak but I do not hear and they do not hear me either, this is a software compatibility problem Sound Blaster Commands which controls the sound card. Most likely the audio stream format is not suitable for him which is used on Webrtc. This only happens when the viewer switches to webrtc in a region with this service.
Annryk Resident
My voice on webrts worked on versions
7.1.12.13550888671 (only with it turned off Echo Cancellation)
Firestorm 7.1.12 (77610) (in all modes)
Thank you for your work!)
RestrainedRaptor Resident
I thought this was already in progress last year. Surely its status should be 'tracked' at the very least.
Nyx Onyx
Perhaps if there's still delay due to too many being on old viewers, perhaps we could have an ability for Estate Managers / Region Owners to turn it on through support tickets, or even better, through the region console?
VenKellie Resident
i wondered where my post went too ty. Ya im sick of Vivox being unreliable, im even noticing issues of its use in other games that use it, notiably World of Warcraft. If those on firestorm 6 use voice, then its either upgrade now or lose voice, enough is enough of waiting while the rest of us on a 7 viewer have to deal with unreliable service.
KyliaDaden Resident
I strongly support changing over to WebRTC for one particular thing:
SCTP
(Or SCTP-over-UDP in case there's no native implementation of SCTP in the OS.)
This can be leveraged to provide a mature messaging protocol that's likely better than current proprietary protocol over UDP.
Hadet Sonnenkern
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't this rollout supposed to happen in April of last year? What is the holdup? If it's users on older viewers still, they will upgrade if they want voice. This is currently making it a nightmare to distribute viewers without vivox redistribution licenses. It's also holding mobile viewer usage back, and making it annoying to ship aarch64 native viewers to anything but MacOS.
Send Starlight
Hadet Sonnenkern I'm normally annoyed at how slow LL is at implementing things. But, voice is absolutely one of the features they shouldn't implement incorrectly. If they need more time to improve the quality of this feature, then they need more time. It's such a critical feature. If they mess this up it could end the platform.
Note: I say this as the submitter who created the approved WebRTC JIRA feature request that started them down this war path. Though, it is lost to time now. I've been waiting longer for this feature than most now. ;-D
Hadet Sonnenkern
Send Starlight I mean it's been started being rolled out but there are some major issues that Windows 11 users are running into on the viewer end of things currently and the way LL is tracking bugs right now is kinda painful. I wish they would unify everything on Github. It is a headache to keep track of everything currently. For me on MacOS, Linux and Mobile WebRTC is flawless, but a lot of my friends on Windows 11, have issues like their voice going robotic, just randomly cutting out or changing their microphone volume in the Windows sound mixer.
Send Starlight
Hadet Sonnenkern The WebRTC code is on LL's github for this project. The project lead on it is the same one that implemented High Fidelity's voice.
I haven't tested their webrtc code since last year when they initially announced it, though.
Here is the issue for robotic voice opened on march 2025:
Here is every issue labeled webrtc:
Note: They've even had a bot auto-linking the issues back to their Canny. As of 06/18/25, the WebRTC feature is listed as 50% complete, with 7 open issues and 7 closed, no due date set.
Maybe they need to respond more and interact with the community more. But, this is way more feedback we've had from the developers than in the past. In the past they wouldn't even tell us what they were working on until they were already done.
Signal Linden
Merged in a post:
WebRTC Switch please
VenKellie Resident
Vivox is starting to become UNreliable for the past few months and its to the point of now begging on here for the switch to webrtc for voice.
Takes a good 2 minutes after logging in to get a dot, thats if one comes up at all.
Sometimes just randomly 1 person in the local voice range loses a dot while the rest of us are still chatting.
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