Discord only sends your voice to the channel you are in, and a bot can hold one voice connection per server. So the Callout bot listens in your caller's channel and one speaker bot per party channel plays what it hears. Audio is forwarded without re-encoding, adding about 0.1–0.3 seconds.
Why it takes bots#
Discord sends your voice only to the voice channel you are sitting in, and a bot account can hold exactly one voice connection per server. Reaching six party channels at once therefore takes six bots in voice, plus one more listening to the callers. On the hosted service those bots are ours; if you run it yourself, each is its own Discord application — see self-hosting.
- The Callout bot sits in the shot caller channel, undeafened, and listens to the callers.
- One speaker bot per party channel plays whatever the callers say.
- Players stay in their own party and talk like normal; the caller comes through on top.
The audio path#
When one person is talking to a channel — the common case — their Opus audio packets are forwarded exactly as their Discord client encoded them. Nothing is decoded or re-encoded, so there is no quality loss and almost no processing. Only when several voices reach the same channel at once (two voice teams callers, or several leaders using talk back) are they decoded, mixed and encoded once.
A short jitter buffer smooths out Discord's bursty packet delivery so callouts don't stutter.
Latency#
Expect about a tenth to three tenths of a second between the caller speaking and the parties hearing it. Over a second is not normal — see troubleshooting.
Who is heard where#
| Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| Voice priority filtering | Only people with the primary or backup caller role are relayed; primaries pre-empt backups. |
| Voice teams | A channel on a team hears that team's callers; a channel on no team hears every caller. |
| Talk back | A party leader's priority key reaches the callers; other parties don't hear it. |
| Cross-server | The starting server's callers reach the speaker channels of both allied servers. |