Mumble VS Killed by Google

I think Sonobus is overkill. I suggest you look at a couple of relatively old-school gamer voice chat tools - Mumble or Teamspeak. Mumble is open-source and the connection is always encrypted, Teamspeak is commercial but the free tier should be fine for you - but you have to make sure to manually turn encryption on yourself. It has been a long time since I used either, so I don't know which is easier. Both of them require you to run their matching server software.

Mumble's latency is unbeatable imo, it's basically their main focus and shows.

The sticking point for me is the lack of persistent messages, something the devs strangely think is a privacy plus. Issue open since 2016: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/2560

If you drop out for a minute you won't have access to anything that was posted in chat, which makes it useless for anything other than voice only comms, that might suit some business purposes but I've always needed to post links or screenshots in chat during meetings.

There's any number of alternative chat applications available, like Element, Mumble, Teamspeak etc.

Mumble?

I think Mumble might fit what you're looking for. It's been a very long time since I've used it, but it seems to still exist: https://www.mumble.info/ - I've used previously for exactly what you're describing, events with lots of crew dispersed around and no budget for radios. I had it installed on an AP running OpenWRT so it was just a case of plugging that in and getting people to install the app and connect to it.

Along with the options already mentioned, if you're not into TeamSpeak, there is an open source alternative called Mumble which operates in the same manner. No internet required, and is supported on multiple platforms.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Their reputation is deserved. Google domains was killed only last year!

And this isn't even the first time I've been burned by Google's decisions. If you're familiar at all with the Google Graveyard, you'll know that Google has a long history of killing off products and services that people have come to rely on. This has happened to me a number of times, in both a personal and professional capacity, and frankly it's getting old.

Just because Google has a couple of decent services that you're willing to pay for doesn't detract from the fact that most of their products have a worse life expectancy than a victorian child in the 1800s. https://killedbygoogle.com

They ruined every single opportunity to be more than an advertising company since Orkut. With scrapped attempts, starts and lack of intention for most of the 2010s to even during the early half of the Pixel Era, they seemingly haven't learnt to stick to something and iterate on it well.

And the fact that over 50% of their revenues come from search and by extension, advertising.

The fact' that til this day, they still haven't evolved from the "throwing shit at the wall then at the fan" strat which explains how they have fumbled so much so quickly.

Yeah. The Google Graveyard really shows how far this can go.

https://killedbygoogle.com

The punchline is that in addition to hundreds of failed hobby projects, their stock is doing great. Monopoly power is a helluva drug.

To me Gemini is just sort of generic and uninteresting. There has to be hundreds or thousands of products and companies based on the name "Gemini" - "Bard" was at least interesting, different and distinct.

I've no idea about the quality of the product itself, I have never had a reason to use it. It's long past cliché now but I wouldn't get too attached to a Google product that is definitely costing a lot of money but which has no clear pathway to turning a profit. I think they will keep it ticking over until the hype train moves on from Chatbots/LLMs, and then it'll join the Google Graveyard @ https://killedbygoogle.com

We're not talking about reliability, we're talking about Google's penchant for killing established products that people use. https://killedbygoogle.com

The website you're referring to: https://killedbygoogle.com/