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Speak Freely is an Internet telephone for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and various flavors of Unix that allows you, with appropriate hardware and software, to send and receive audio, in real time, over a computer network. You can converse with anybody else similarly connected anywhere on Earth without paying long-distance phone charges.

Speak Freely is better than using your regular telephone not only because you aren't running up your phone bill, but also because your conversation is secure from eavesdroppers. Speak Freely provides three different kinds of encryption, including the same highly-secure IDEA algorithm PGP uses to encrypt message bodies. By using PGP to automatically exchange session keys, you can Speak Freely to total strangers, over public networks, with greater security than most readily available telephone scramblers provide.

Speak Freely for Windows is 100% compatible Speak Freely for Unix, currently available for a variety of Unix workstations, including Linux. Windows users can converse, over the Internet, with users of those Unix machines. In addition, Speak Freely supports the Internet Real-Time Protocol (RTP) and the original protocol used by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's Visual Audio Tool (VAT); by selecting the correct protocol, you can communicate with any other network voice program which conforms to one of these standards.

Multicasting is implemented, allowing those whose networks support the facility to create multi-party discussion groups to which users can subscribe and drop at will. For those without access to Multicasting, a rudimentary Broadcast capability allows transmission of an audio feed to multiple hosts on a fast local network.

Speak-Freely is an Internet voice application that allows you to talk (actually send voice, not typed characters) over the internet.

Speak-Freely is undergoing new development, ie. new documentation and support.

Speak-Freely requires that you meet the following conditions to communicate:

* A _true_ Internet IP address for either your computer or the person's computer you wish to talk to
* A way to share to one person or the other their real IP address, such as 63.157.141.2
* A microphone with working sound settings. (When is the last time you used or tested it?)
* A firewall that does not block the assigned UDP ports (2074 or 2075 typically)
* A Pentium II class computer for CELP and Speex compression, of at least 200-300Mhz.
* A dialup connection at least 28kb/sec. (most of you have faster computers and connections)
* Possibly a set of headphones instead of your speakers for at least one person communicating. Echo-cancellation is not programmed into the audio codecs.

If you meet the criteria above, the benefits are a better quality connection with less lag time between you and the person you are talking to. Services such as MSN and Yahoo pipe all their communication through their local servers and forward it to you, which adds to the delay in network traffic. All internet voice applications will have some delay, depending how far apart and the network traffic between you and the person that you are talking to. Diagrams of the major internet voice applications and how they work should be forthcoming.