Gamers know how important is to communicate with their squad or teammates to conquer the battleground. Most of the games today include built-in voice chat but they are not so good and won’t work all the time as expected. Some may work but not good and some may not even work.
In this evolving gaming industry like cloud gaming, there is a huge variety of tools and apps to improve the gaming experience.
Whether it’s a voice chat app or gaming tools, you need the best to get the most out of your game. If you are searching for good voice chat apps to communicate with your teammates, here are the 5 best voice apps to talk to your friends in the group.
1. Discord
Discord is a free-to-use service that enables the player to chat with other players in the same group via voice or text. They can create a friends list and add the players to it. So that they can contact their friends anytime. Players can join various servers or create their own and start communicating.
Discord offers many features. One of the most useful and handy features is Gamemode. It is very useful for Youtubers if they are live streaming. Gamemode hides all the private information, emotes, and voice chat. Discord also offers DDoS and IP protection. This protects the players from DDoS attacks.
Additionally, Discord lets you add bots to your server to modify it as per your liking. For example, you can add Discord music bots to your server to play music from various sources on your server.
Players can also assign custom hotkeys and use Discord as an in-game overlay. The overlay is also a useful feature of discord. It allows the players to play the game as well as to communicate with other players using discord. It basically allows players to interact with both the game and other players at the same time. The service also includes the individual volume for other players so that the player can set their volume individually for each player.
Pros
- 100% Free to use(includes free to create many servers as you want)
- Security features(DDoS and IP protection)
- Good tech support via Twitter
Cons
- No self-hosted servers
Supports macOS, Windows, Linux, Andriod, and iOS
2. Team Speak
Team Speak is also an excellent option to communicate with your teammates. It uses codecs named CELT, Speex, and Opus(Discord only uses Opus) for voice chat and archives some good low latency. Teamspeak is useful for admins as it gives a lot of permission options to set to control and manage their server.
This is not the case with discord. Maybe the discord developers had decided to exclude these features to make the app clean and simple.
Teamspeak also supports file transfer and Anonymous usage. Individual volume levels can also be set in Teamspeak. This service support AES Encryption which can be enabled by admins. This makes all the communication encrypted inside the server and users other than the server won’t have access to it.
One of the good things about it is that encryption can be enabled server-wide or to a specific conversation. Teamspeak also offers offline/LAN functionality and a fully customizable user interface.
Pros
- Offline/Lan Functionality
- Gamepad and joystick hotkey support
- Advanced Permission Controls
Cons
- Outdated UI
Supports macOS, Windows, Linux, Andriod, and iOS
3. Mumble
Mumble is a VoIP-based chat tool for Gamers. Unlike Teamspeak, encryption is always enabled(Must be turned on manually in Teamspeak). Mumble doesn’t have any service behind it. Mumble is an open-source tool thus making it run on all operating systems including windows, mac, and Linux.
It is a very lightweight and lag-free chat tool. Mumble also supports Low latency and high-quality voice. It uses Speex codecs to give an impressive audio quality to users. Speex also provides echo cancellations to Mumble. The bandwidth it requires is around 20 kbps and it is relatively low. The capacity of the app is no more than 18 MB and is also a lightweight app and is not seeking a huge amount of resources to run.
Pros
- Open-source
- Echo Cancellation
Cons
- Requires technical skills to set up
Supports macOS, Windows, Linux, Andriod, and iOS
4. Overtone
Overtone is also a great app for gamers to communicate with their squads or teammates. The app’s interface is very simple and user-friendly. Overtone is based on Vivox. Vivox is one of the best-integrated voice and text chat services that is used by popular games like PUBG, Fortnite, the world of tanks, etc.
It is free to use app that comes in a lightweight body. It doesn’t consume a lot of resources and it is very simple to set up. Overtone also allows people to connect with other people with similar interests and discover other players playing the same game. Unlike some other apps, overtone can also run in the browser.
Pros
- Uses Vivox
- Free to use
- Lightweight
Cons
- Creating a team is not allowed on the web
Supports Windows
5. SteamChat
Most gamers know steam. It is widely used by gamers around the world due to its extreme popularity and tons of games available to download and play. Steam has chat built into it. Many of the gamers have installed steam and running in the background. why not give it a shot before downloading and trying out other apps from the list? it comes in handy if the player plays the game from the steam like PUBG PC.
Steam enabled the chat on the web too so that the players can use steam chat on the browser if they don’t have the steam app installed. It also enables players to create a group and adds their friends to it.
Players can join the other groups with just a simple click with a unique URL. Players can mark other players as favorites which will be displayed separately in the favorites tab. Chat admins can set roles for members allowing them to manage the group, set chat restrictions, and kick out other members.
Pros
- Web client available
- Extremely popular service used by millions of people
Cons
- The audio quality is not much good
Supports Windows, macOS, and Linux
Conclusion
We’ve looked over all of the top voice chat apps and recommendations for gamers, and these are the ones that we believe are the best choice. We hope this article has helped you decide which one to use. Have a happy gaming experience!
