Voice chat
Sessions have built-in voice, so a remote game doesn’t need a second app open beside it. It is off until you turn it on — opening a game never touches your microphone.
Joining
Open Voice chat from the table menu — the pill in the bottom-right corner of the felt — and press Join voice. Your browser will ask for microphone permission the first time; taybl can’t ask on your behalf, so if you dismiss that prompt nothing happens until you allow it.
Voice also appears in the waiting room, which is usually the better place to start it — you can talk while you wait for the last player, and the call carries straight through into the game without reconnecting.
The panel
The panel lists everyone currently in the call, in their seat colours:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| A green glow around someone’s face | They are talking right now |
| A crossed-out mic | They have muted themselves |
| A headphones icon | They joined without a working microphone — they can hear you, you can’t hear them |
| “no audio” | Your two computers couldn’t reach each other (see When someone can’t hear you below) |
The same green glow appears around the player’s face in the row of players in the felt’s top-left corner, so you can tell who is speaking without opening the panel at all. The table menu’s Voice chat row carries a count of how many people are talking too — which is what you go by on a narrow screen, where that row of faces isn’t drawn.
Mute
Mute stops sending your audio immediately. Your microphone stays open — your browser will still show its recording indicator — so unmuting is instant rather than re-asking for the device. Leave ends the call and releases the microphone properly; the indicator goes out then.
Once you are in the call, a mute button appears on the table menu’s pill, beside End turn — so silencing yourself is always one press, rather than something you have to open a menu for. Joining and leaving stay in the panel.
Headphones are worth it
taybl asks your browser for echo cancellation, which handles most of it, but a laptop playing other people out of its speakers and back into its own microphone will still echo for everyone else. Headphones — any headphones — remove the problem entirely.
If you open the same table in two tabs, only one of them can be in voice. The second is refused, because two live microphones at one desk is a feedback loop that is very hard to diagnose from the other end.
Where the audio goes
Voice connects players directly to each other. The audio does not pass through taybl’s servers, is never recorded, and is never stored. taybl only carries the initial handshake that lets two browsers find each other, and the small flags that draw the panel — who is in, who is muted, who is talking.
A useful consequence: if taybl’s connection hiccups mid-game, the call keeps going. The panel may freeze for a moment and the table will stop updating, but nobody drops out of the conversation.
When someone can’t hear you
A direct connection needs both networks to allow it, and some don’t — office, school and hotel networks are the usual culprits. When that happens you’ll see “no audio” beside that one person.
This is always between two specific people, never the whole table: everyone else in the call still hears you both normally. There is no setting that fixes it from taybl’s side. What sometimes works is switching the blocked player to a different network — a phone hotspot is the quickest test.
Limits
Because everyone connects to everyone else, voice is sized for a normal table — up to eight players. Above that it is refused rather than allowed to quietly sound bad.
Voice needs a secure (https) connection and a browser that supports it. If yours doesn’t, the Voice chat row simply isn’t there. On iPhone and iPad, switching to another app pauses the call until you come back.
There is no push-to-talk, no per-person volume, no device picker and no host mute yet. Use the text chat panel alongside voice when someone needs to be heard in writing.