Skype Gets A New Competitor: Amazon Announces Chime (geekwire.com)

Amazon has released new service to make voice and video calls and share screen. Called Chime, the service is aimed at business users. It directly competes with well-known players such as Skype, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, Zoom, and Cisco's WebEx, among others. From a report: Amazon Web Services today unveiled Chime, a new service that it says takes the "frustration out of meetings" by delivering video, voice, chat, and screen sharing. Instead of forcing participants to call one another on a dedicated line, Amazon Chime automatically calls all participants at the start of a meeting, so "joining a meeting is as easy as clicking a button in the app, no PIN required," the company said in a press release. Chime also shows a visual roster of participants, and allows participants to pinpoint who exactly on the call is creating annoying background noise.

Comments

But the question...

[loranger]

...does it run well on all operating systems?

and... no Linux client

[Dakiraun]

So... just as useless as all the other offerings.

WebRTC turns 5

[0100010001010011]

https://webrtc.org/ "WebRTC is a free, open project that provides browsers and mobile applications with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple APIs. The WebRTC components have been optimized to best serve this purpose."

You can host it yourself, internal, inside of your firewall if you're that security paranoid.

There are also solutions hosted by other people if you don't want to deal with that:

https://appear.in/

https://opentokrtc.com/

https://talky.io/

Expensive!

[Guillermito]

Looks like it costs $15 per user per month for for any plan that allows calls with more than 2 participants. For comparison, I believe Google Suite is $5 per user, and includes email, calendar and an office suite apart from the conferencing software. Or if you want just video calls I think hangouts is free for up to 5 participants. Hangouts and Skype are not nearly perfect, but most of the time they are good enough. How much better this has to be to justify paying that steep price?

Re:Great, another AppData directory bomb

[pecosdave]

So, I downloaded the client.

I logged in as my test domain user - his name is Norm L. User. I right-clicked the installer exe - no there wasn't an MSI even in this day and age - and chose "Run as Administrator" which is exactly what I'm going to have to do for one off user installs.

Without asking it installed directly into my administrator accounts AppData directory.

STRIKE 3!!!!

This program is crap from a corporate perspective.

Killer features?

[MMC Monster]

You want killer features for a conference calling app?

1 - Highlight on your screen all the people who are currently talking.
2 - Automatic transcription of calls with the individuals talking labeled.
3 - Ability to pass along a 'talking now' and 'request talking' tokens so that someone can "raise their hand" while someone else is talking. Also the ability to cede the talking now token to one of the other people talking (for when a lot of people are on a conference call)

Or do current apps have all of this?