As indicated in a recent official blog post, the WebRTC voice service is due to complete its deployment to the entire main grid (Agni) on Tuesday, May 5th, 2026.
Currently available across around 25% of the grid on RC channels, the full deployment of WebRTC will see the completion of the initial phase of converting Second Life to a Voice service that is not dependent on a third-party supplier (Vivox) and can be directly maintained and enhanced by Linden Lab, opening the door to a potential range of new capabilities in the future (such as voice-to-text).
The WebRTC project started roughly two years ago, when the Lab first publicly made known it was looking to move Voice services away from a reliance on Vivox and the SL Voice plug-in for the viewer to something more modern and potentially capable. WebRTC (RTC=”real-time communication”) was selected as it is something of a “defacto standard”, being built-in to most web browsers and supporting wide range of real-time communications tools in common use.
Since then the project has taken time to mature and reach a point where the Lab is confident it can be fully deployed across the grid without too much risk of disruption, particularly now that people are increasingly using viewers which have adopted WebRTC in their more recent versions (which was a particular problem for Firestorm with its large user-base, where because WebRTC was somewhat linked to the arrival of PBR and the performance impacts that caused, many users opted to remain with “pre-PBR” versions of the Firestorm viewer which also did not have the requisite support for WebRTC).
What This Means
- Firstly, if you do not use Voice at all, then probably not a lot.
- If you are using a recent (i.e. from around mid-2024 onwards) viewer version, you’ll most likely already have WebRTC support even if you never actually use it.
- If Voice has never been a part of your SL and you’re on a viewer version without WebRTC support, you can allow other factors and viewer updates determine your upgrade path.
- If you do use Voice, and again are on a “recent” version of a viewer, then you again don’t need to do anything; the change to grid-wide availability of WebRTC occurs on the simulator / server side of things, so there is no need to upgrade your viewer.
- That said, if you want to have the latest bug fixes for WebRTC, and are not already using it, then you should consider updating to the latest release version of the official viewer, or whether your preferred TPV has incorporated the fixes in either a release or beta/RC version.
- As the legacy Vivox system is decommissioned, viewer versions reliant on that service will lose all Voice functionality. This is a mandatory backend change by Linden Lab that cannot be altered or bypassed by third-party viewers. So if you wish to continue to use Voice and are on an older version of your preferred viewer, you should update to a WebRTC-capable version in order to smoothly continue using Voice.
- If you regularly use the SL Mobile App, again there is nothing you need to do; the App already supports WebRTC.
- One of the more noticeable impacts of the full deployment will be with peer-to-peer (P2P) Voice communications. During the transitional period, when both WebRTC and Vivox have both been operational on the grid, cross-system P2P communications between WebRTC and Vivox have not always functioned correctly. With the full deployment of WebRTC, this will no longer be an issue.
- Similarly, other points of confusion (and possible disconnects) as a result of moving between regions running the two services will also be eliminated, as WebRTC will be the primary service across all regions.
Adding Capabilities
Moving forward, the WebRTC service will continue to be enhanced. In fact, as a part of this work, WebRTC viewer-side voice moderation capabilities are already being tested on the grid using the Second Life 2026.02 Release Candidate (RC) viewer available via the Alternate Viewers page.
Voice moderation provides the following capabilities to authorised users (e.g. Group moderators): mute or unmute individual participants; mute or unmute all users in a voice channel; manage disruptive or unintended background noise. Further:
- WebRTC voice moderation is already available in some TPVs, so check the release notes on the most recent versions (including any beta/RC versions) of your preferred viewer to see if this is the case.
- The official 2026.02 RC viewer with the voice moderation capabilities will be promoted to release status in the near future, allowing the code to be picked-up and incorporated in all TPVs as and when they update.
As well as voice moderation tools, and as noted above, WebRTC offers the potential for other capabilities such as voice-to-text, etc., to be added. In fact, experiments with voice-to-text have been underway within the Lab for some time, although the focus on getting the initial WebRTC fit for full deployment means that this work is far from complete and has yet to make it to a publicly-accessible project or RC viewer. Given this, it may be a while before the capability surfaces for public testing.
In the meantime, if you wish to keep up-to-date with WebRTC development, it is frequently a subject for discussion at the following user groups:
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 