Not Your Ordinary Chat Room

By Christian Nielsen - 12/08
NEIRAD enilno edition

I'm upstairs in my room, doing homework on my laptop, and I start to smell dinner being cooked downstairs. I'm never really sure when dinner will be ready, and being the lazy person that I am, I usually shout down the stairs (much to the delight of my mother).

Yet, with the electronic world continually progressing Ventrilo can serve as the means of communication for such a question—that way I won’t have to strain my voice. No, Ventrilo is not some robotic maid I can send to do my bidding.

Ventrilo is an electronic hearing and speaking device through which people can talk to others who are wearing the device and connected to the computer. Since there is a computer downstairs, and I'm on my laptop upstairs, all my family would need to do is connect to the Ventrilo server, and inform me that dinner is ready. In this sense, Ventrilo is kind of like an intercom.

Ventrilo was created as a way for gamers to converse with each-other while not having to take their hands off the keyboard (being lazy), but today it has a much broader range of use. Ventrilo acts kind of like an AIM chat room, except people are talking to one another using microphones instead of typing messages. Ventrilo is a free download, but you need to have a server in order to converse with a group of people.

You can set up passwords, ranks, and customize aspects of sound using Ventrilo servers. A word of advice -- if you get a bunch of people to chip in, $15 a month for a server shouldn't be that hefty of a price tag. Sophomore Tommy Festo said, "Ventrilo lets me talk to all of my friends at once, and it is a really useful program for many things." Instead of having one-on-one conversations with friends, when you want to talk to all of your friends at once you can use Ventrilo to converse with a group. A Ventrilo server could be setup to back up a Web site that has voice interaction with its creators, and it can even be used for live customer support.

Another great feature about Ventrilo is that if you don't happen to have a microphone, you can still use the chat feature, and you can even leave comments next to your name. If you don't want to go out and buy a microphone but you still want to be able to talk to your friends all at once, Ventrilo is flexible enough to allow text chatting simultaneously with voice communication. Ventrilo was first introduced for Windows in 2002, and it started off with a small amount of people using it.

Today, Ventrilo can be used both on PCs and Macs and the user-base has grown into the thousands. The original creators of Ventrilo are Flagship Industries Inc. The company’s only current product is Ventrilo, which allows the company to focus its attention solely on improving and producing the product. With a constant stream of patches (updates and fixes to the program) and a company’s undivided attention, Ventrilo can only get better.

Sophomore Jon Nee says, "I use Ventrilo so I don't have to deal with talking to people one at a time. It sometimes gets annoying having to tell people the same thing over and over again, if everyone is there, you don't have to repeat anything,” Nee said. Although originally developed to keep gamers’ hands at the keyboard, people are realizing the multiple uses for Ventrilo.

With our generation already relying so much on computers Ventrilo may be a new technological breakthrough ready to become a part of our everyday lives. So with our own busy life styles already devoted to a cell phone in one hand, a BlackBerry in the other, Ventrilo can work nicely propped on our heads.