Second Life racks up 1 billion voice minutes last month. Linden Lab announces new services
by Tateru Nino 
May 20th 2009 at 9:00AM
Filed under: Betas, Business models, News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Linden Lab has announced that it is currently averaging one billion voice-minutes per month. That's time actively engaged in a voice session, not just time spent with voice support enabled. That's quite a statistic. That puts Second Life's voice service right up there among the top VoIP providers, and around 12% of Skype. That's very impressive.
In the 18 months since voice was introduced, roughly 15 billion voice-minutes have been served, through Vivox's voice services for Second Life. Additionally there are new products/services. Some available from today, and some scheduled for later this year.
SLim, the offline voice/text messaging client for Second Life from Vivox will be getting a new version today. We've been using the new version ourselves for the last couple of days, and it has fixed most of the complaints we had about it. It seems much smoother and more reliable, and to synchronize much better with what is actually happening on the grid.
Also today is Avaline, which starts as a beta today, and becomes a monetized service in Q3 this year. Avaline, simply, allows someone to call in and establish a voice session with your avatar from a land-line or mobile phone anywhere.
It's the first of the monetized voice services. Monetized how? "AvaLine will be the first voice feature to be monetized after the Beta. AvaLine will be monetized by charging (in L$) for reserving an extension for your avatar. There is no per call fee, and callers will not be charged unless they need to make a long distance call into the access number. The L$ fee for this can be set to renew (or lapse) on a monthly or annual basis. The annual L$ fee will be 20-25% cheaper than buying 12 months."
As yet, it is a bit early to say about where access numbers might eventually be located.
Coming in the second half of the year:
- Voice fonts for Second Life voice. "French Woman, Sports Announcer, Elf, A.M. Radio, etc" -- unfortunately, in our experience, voice fonts work best for teens and pre-teens, and poorly for adults due to the pitch and timbre of their voices.
- SLim-to-SMS: Which basically allows you to send SMS text messages from the SLim client to any SMS-enabled phone.
- Client-side recording: Definitely a boon for many, particularly educators and enterprise users. Second Life users will be able to record voice chat for playback later.
Even more features have been announced for 2010, including conference calls, group text/voice chat (via SLim) and browser-based voice applets on the Second Life Web-site.
As yet, no pricing information has been finalized for the new products, but SLim itself looks to be free for the foreseeable future.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
IYan said on 9:58AM 5-20-2009
>That's quite a statistic.
Think that statistic through.
You have 30 people on the island, all with default voice enabled. You have one minute of somebody not knowing his mic is on. Voice carries over the whole island. So how many "minutes of conversation" is that?
SL does many-to-many voice, where rarely all who can hear actively wish to participate. Most, if not all other VoIP services, are usually one-to-one and on-demand. Comparing "minutes of voice served" is comparing apples to oranges.
And given that LL has not specified exactly how they arrive to that number, I have to take it as yet another example of the marketing department desperately ransacking databases for some statistics that would sound favorable. Remember, last year it was "unprecedented land growth"..
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Tateru Nino said on 11:45AM 5-20-2009
We asked. It's time spent with push-to-talk enabled, either because you've actually pushed it, or because you're making enough noise to pass the automatic-enable threshold. You could be yawning, or yelling at the grandkids, of course - but I'm not sure there's a better measure.
IYan said on 12:08PM 5-20-2009
Yes - but it's definitely calculated times N where N=number of people who can hear you.
Unlike Skype, where everybody has elected to hear you, in SL that is usually not true.
So two people chatting for 5 mins = 5 mins voice traffic for Skype and 50 minutes voice traffic for a SL conversation with 9 other people in the vicinity (say, the same store).
Tateru Nino said on 12:14PM 5-20-2009
No, we were told it was calculated based on *speakers* not listeners.
IYan said on 12:32PM 5-20-2009
I find that very hard to believe.
IYan said on 12:34PM 5-20-2009
(but still, SL users are nothing if not chatty - the 1B comes out to 10+ hours per month per active SL user, which is not too implausible)
IYan said on 12:42PM 5-20-2009
Er.. my additional comment has gone missing?
"But still, SL users are nothing if not chatty - 1B per month is cca 11 hours per active SL users, which I guess is plausible."
Kara Spengler said on 11:23AM 5-20-2009
Just what we need, another "feature" being added while they have real problems with the grid (many caused by adding previous "features").
Like IYan said, I doubt the reliability of their quoted statistic. Unless there is some mass of active SL users who use voice all the time. Usually, the vast majority time I encounter it are during meetings (bleah!) or where someone who is blind is present. Rarely do I encounter it in a purely social setting.
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Opensource Obscure said on 7:35AM 5-21-2009
The dichotomy between "adding new features" and "fixing existing problems" won't help us in a better understanding/judgement of the Second Life's development.
I'd also have to say that I don't get why should anyone be reading this blog if they don't trust Tateru Nino and doubt the reliability of data she's reporting about. This puzzles me.
Why should mine or anyone's else personal experience be more reliable than these data?
Mudbeed said on 11:03AM 5-20-2009
Where can I find out what has been fixed with the SLim client.
Most users complaints were that you still needed to install the SL client and that the SLim service used ports not often used, hence making it impossible for most to use in a work environment due to firewall issues.
I used all of your link and SLs official Blog and all I see is old notes etc... nothing about fixes etc.
Thanks in advance for the help
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Tateru Nino said on 7:15AM 5-21-2009
Mostly, it seems that the fixes are general polish (which the previous edition lacked) and actually maintaining some sort of plausible synchronization with the SL grid (SLim uses little or no SL technology - just a few APIs that allow it to access data there). Synchronization was the worst feature of the previous release, with the users-online rarely having any relation to the users that were *actually* online.
ethereal.wolf said on 6:31PM 5-20-2009
thats a whole lot of cybersex going on.
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Loki said on 6:42AM 5-21-2009
I have been in SL for almost 4 years and i still prefer to text chat. I have a phobia of phones. I would love to use SLim, but it seems to force me to activate Voice chat in my viewer a feature which im scared to use. Is there a way to turn of the voice side of SLim and just use the text side?
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Mudbeed said on 8:50AM 5-21-2009
Thanks Tateru!
This is kind of a dissapointment to most in the dev community. A lot of us hoped that they would scrap the vivox IM system for something much more lightweight and user friendly. You can't use the IM at work due to firewall restrictions and you need to sync up with the client. (A million JIRA posts about this one)
I really don't know why LL can't just release an IM client rather than rely on 3rd parties. Sync-ing wouldn't need to be necessary and they could use ports used by most IM clients like YIM, MSN AIM... etc.
I haven't found a reason to use SLim at home, but once I do I will give it a shot.
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Jurek Twine said on 11:31PM 5-22-2009
It excites me that this part of Second Life experience is getting so much attention from Lindens recently; voice communication is definitely a big part of the way how humans interact.
In fact, we even started offering our VoIP services to Second Life residents independently of Linden Labs just before they announced it (what a coincidence!.. http://getconrad.com/sl-early-access-offer).
I really hope residents will be able to enjoy all the benefits of modern telephony, both in-world and in RL — and we're doing our best, too. It would be fun to compete with LL!
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