Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

I will definitely try this because I have trouble with all other voice chat services including Skype, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Often one of those three will work but not always.<p>But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the other hand, absolutely ruins the experience.<p>I always see these services talking about &quot;crystal clear quality&quot;, but never latency, which is a shame. Maybe there is simply nothing they can do about it. I&#x27;ve noticed latency get worse and worse on the Internet since I started using it in the 90s and nobody seems to talk about it.<p>There are so many more sources of latency on every layer on the modern internet and it&#x27;s a damn shame. I remember when interleaving got enabled on my ADSL and latency to everything doubled overnight. Then there are NATs, and all kinds of filtering shit that ISPs insist on. Sigh...

&quot; Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network.&quot;<p>Is it just me or does this sound like serious bullshit? Unless you have some hard evidence of course...

&quot;Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network.&quot;<p>What sort of parameters are adjusted?

Does anyone have an opinion on the new &quot;three-message modification of the standard DH key exchange&quot; they introduced for calls?<p>From their API doc: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;core.telegram.org&#x2F;api&#x2F;end-to-end&#x2F;voice-calls#key-verification" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;core.telegram.org&#x2F;api&#x2F;end-to-end&#x2F;voice-calls#key-ver...</a><p>&gt; Party A will generate a shared key with B — or whoever pretends to be B — without having a second chance to change its exponent a depending on the value g_b received from the other side; and the impostor will not have a chance to adapt his value of b depending on g_a, because it has to commit to a value of g_b before learning g_a.<p>&gt; The use of hash commitment in the DH exchange constrains the attacker to only one guess to generate the correct visualization in their attack, which means that using just over 33 bits of entropy represented by four emoji in the visualization is enough to make a successful attack highly improbable.

I&#x27;ve managed to setup Telegram for most of my (non-technical) family - wife, siblings, mother (she doesn&#x27;t even have a smart phone and just uses Telegram as a message client on her desktop. It&#x27;s a very convenient way to share family related pictures).<p>Voice calls are an excellent addition. If these could now also be extended to video calls, I could likely ditch Skype forever.

I&#x27;m using Telegram as my main messaging system but I hope they&#x27;ll open source everything. That&#x27;s the only way to fully audit the service.<p>Telegram is not too bad but has too many grey areas at this moment.

Signal has this as well. I trust their security (personal bias), but unfortunately the call quality is a non-starter at the moment.

The emoji out of band authentication is cool, but probably annoying. You have to read those emoji by voice to the other end, so they can check them. That could be a pain if the emoji are chosen randomly from the 2600 available emoji.<p>The idea comes from the STU-3 secure phone, where there was a 2-digit number display to be read back by voice. It&#x27;s one of the ways to detect a man-in-the-middle attack. If there&#x27;s a MITM, the crypto bits sent and received are different, because the MITM is re-encrypting, and this is detectable if you have some out of band channel for comparing them. A MITM would thus have to be able to fake the voice of the other party.<p>With techniques like this, you can make an MITM work arbitrarily hard to maintain the illusion that it&#x27;s the other party. I&#x27;ve proposed some ways to do this for web pages.

But seriously how do they pay their bills? (I know VK brothers are super rich)<p>There are bots that relay huge media files<p>It&#x27;s probably (imo) the fastest &amp; most complete cloud based chat app<p>Everything.. Literally everything you share can be retrived over the cloud<p>&amp; and now calling<p>That must be super expensive infrastructure? No investors no monetization

I tried <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appear.in" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appear.in</a> recently for a short call with a student and it worked well. A friend and fellow freelancer also uses it, he said. One good point about it is if you need to do a quick ad-hoc call - it is browser-based (probably uses WebRTC), and also does not need to you create an account or sign in. Plan to try it more in future, as well as TeamSpeak which I also mentioned in this thread. I had installed Wire too, both on PC and Android phone, but not tried it yet with anyone.

Closed source, not end-to-end encrypted by default, end-to-end only device to device (so I can&#x27;t swap seamlessly from a desktop to a mobile session). Not even the protocoll is open, so I am bound to their clients.<p>Sadly it was the only nice alternative when the snowden stuff was published. That means those of my peers who made it away from skype&#x2F;fb&#x2F;whatsapp are now on telegram.

Conference calls! That&#x27;s what we need in a whatsapp&#x2F;telegram like app. Make it a reality to see the end of telco domination in the voice space.

This is your periodic reminder that Telegram uses sketchy crypto and should be avoided.

How many times has this headline been changed? I&#x27;ve seen 3 different ones.

No app wil ever accomplish consistent good voice quality over the internet. Ever. For that it&#x27;s too much of an unreliable network. You may try some calls over Signal, think Hey! This works well! until you hit a moment where the route between endpoints is flaky, attribute it to Signal while using another app for that same call at that particular point in time would have given the same result.<p>Only when QoS will be honored by all internet routers will we reach something that is consistently reliable.

Some artist had fun with this: we have a woman talking on her cell phone while driving and a fully clothed man in a bathtub, with a monocle.

The NN approach sounds interesting, but there are no technical details and it might be hype-based marketing.<p>Is anyone familiar with solid published work on applying ML&#x2F;AI to optimize network control (or, as done here, optimize application parameters depending on network conditions).

I still vote Wire. It used to be buggy, but much better now, plus completely Open Source (Telegram is not).<p>I just placed my first Wire audio call from my phone a few minutes ago: great quality (better than my actual phone service), no noticeable lag.

Can anyone familiar with the matter say how secure is the 4-emoji verification code?

Is it fully controlled by FSB?

My problem with Telegram is I want to use it but they wont let me. I use a budget phone service (freedompop) which apparently is technically voip, but I did not know until I tried to register for Telegram with it. They refuse to send me text verification. Wont work with my google voice number either. WhatsApp does not have this problem. And what if I want to use Telegram on desktop only? Why do I need to verify a phone number?

The UI for trimming and setting the quality of sent videos is really neat. It&#x27;s still annoyingly hard in 2017 to send videos from one mobile to another without needing to completely trash the quality via MMS or upload an often-gigantic file (captured in 1080p or higher) to an intermediary like YouTube or Facebook (and then wait for backend processing).

This is awesome.. I have been trying to video chat with somebody more overseas. Whatsapp video, facebook video, skype, seems like the only thing that works for us right now is Duo.<p>Bad thing: this tech is trapped in Telegram which is quite political of an app. I wish they&#x27;d break it out into something like duo.

I wish they allow arbitrary user identifiers, which are not tied to mobile operators. Just for geeks.

Very welcome addition. Can anyone confirm if this feature will be available on the desktop app as well?

Very good. Great even. But there is a problem. Whatsapp has already won the chat&#x2F;calls app war. Watch it grow massivly in the next year, i promise. Mostly due to incompetence of MS and Google.

Wait, I saw nobody mentioned this, but I feel this is very similar to Slack, group-chatting basically, isn&#x27;t it?

I happened to be reading a comparison of Telegram and Whatsapp this morning [1]. I&#x27;ve never used Whatsapp, is it really this bad or is the reviewer clearly a massive Telegram fanboy&#x2F;girl?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;info.seibert-media.net&#x2F;display&#x2F;Atlassian&#x2F;Comparison+of+Telegram+Messenger+and+Whatsapp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;info.seibert-media.net&#x2F;display&#x2F;Atlassian&#x2F;Comparison+...</a>

Are there any plans to bring group chat to Telegram?

With talk of neural interfaces and augmentation will we have apps in the future that support human to human encryption I wonder?

a neural network learns from your and your -- typo

a neural network learns from your and your

Pied Piper, is that U ?

In a world full of bloated Electron HTML5 &#x2F; JS &quot;desktop apps&quot;, I&#x27;m very happy to see Telegram on Windows is a native app (Qt). It feels so incredibly responsive compared to everything else.