Random video chat with people you have never met

How it works

You choose video, optionally pick a country, and press Start. Your browser asks permission for your camera and microphone — that permission stays with your browser and can be taken back at any time. Within a second or two you are connected to someone else who pressed the same button.

If the conversation is not going anywhere, press Next. You are with someone new immediately and the person you left cannot follow you or message you again. That is the whole loop, and it is why people keep doing it: the cost of a bad conversation is about two seconds.

The video is peer to peer

Your video goes straight from your device to theirs wherever the two networks allow it, rather than through us. When a direct connection is impossible — some mobile networks and office firewalls block it — it passes through a relay we run, which forwards it without storing it.

Nothing is recorded. There is no archive of conversations to leak, because there is no archive.

Why the camera check exists

In video mode your camera has to show you. Your browser looks for a face every few seconds, on your device, and the result is the only thing sent to us. If no face appears for about twenty seconds the conversation ends.

This sounds strict until you have used a site without it. Cameras pointed at a ceiling, a looping recording or a photograph are the single most common way these sites go bad, and they are also the easiest thing to detect.

Choosing where people are from

The country filter is a real filter, not a preference. Set it to Japan and you are only matched with people whose connection says Japan, and only with people who are willing to be matched with your country in turn.

Leaving it open finds someone faster, because the pool is everyone online rather than everyone online in one place.

When it does not work

The camera never turns on. Your browser blocked it. There is a small camera icon in the address bar — open it, allow camera and microphone, then reload. On a phone this permission is sometimes set for the whole browser rather than the site, in the operating system settings.

Another tab has the camera. Only one page can use it at a time on most systems. Close the other video call and reload.

It connects but you see nothing. Usually a network that blocks direct connections. We fall back to a relay automatically, which takes a second or two longer. If it never recovers, a different network — phone data instead of office wifi — almost always fixes it.

Nobody is being found. Check whether you set a country filter. A specific country at a quiet hour can have nobody online at all; setting it back to anywhere will find someone immediately.

Getting a better picture

Light matters more than the camera does. Face a window or a lamp rather than having it behind you — a backlit silhouette is the single most common reason people get skipped, because it reads as someone hiding.

Put the camera at eye level. A laptop on a desk is pointing up your nose, and everyone can tell. A couple of books underneath fixes it.

Use headphones. Without them your speakers feed back into your microphone and the other person hears themselves echoing, which is unbearable and which they will leave rather than explain.

Frequently asked questions