I have a number of kids and their ages span from young to almost adult. We like to play games in our household and with that the ability to communicate verbally when some of the kids can't quite type fast (or spell).
I loathe setting up new accounts for things, especially with small children and I wanted something free that doesn't collect data. Really there aren't any options I felt checked all the boxes so I made this for us.
While building BeebleVox I added features and guardrails that I felt as a parent would be relevant but wanted to be sure the application would be useful for anyone so pretty much everything is as open as can be by default but there is a plethora of controls that can be enabled for a client secured behind a pin that can ease the mind of a parent who wants to let their child have fun and safe communication experiences.
If you feel inclined to also try it out, by all means do so, at the end of the day I get what I want out of it but just wanted to share it.
What is a BeebleVox?
The name is a play on the name Beeblebrox, from Zephod Beeblebrox who is President of the Galaxy in a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He happens to have 2 heads and is very chatty and whimsical so I felt it works.
01
Truly peer-to-peer
Every connection is direct, peer-to-peer over QUIC. There's no server in the middle to sign up for, pay for, or trust — voice and messages hop straight from your machine to your friends', encrypted by the transport and hole-punched through NATs automatically.
02
Rooms & invite tickets
A room is a random topic, not a person. Copy an invite ticket, drop it in your group chat, and anyone can join with a click. The room outlives whoever made it and only disappears when the last person leaves.
Rooms can have an admin and rules defined so trolls can be dealt with. There is a balance of controls to ensure actions can be taken without all the drama of moderators.
03
End-to-end direct messages
Message a friend over a dedicated, cryptographically authenticated QUIC link — nobody relays the bytes but the two of you. Delivery ticks tell the truth: ✓ when it lands, ✗ when they're offline. No servers means no one holding your messages.
04
File sharing, no size cap
Right-click a friend, pick a file, done. Transfers go direct and BLAKE3-verified, resume if the connection drops, and never touch a server — there's nowhere to upload to, so there's no limit and no snooping.
05
Skins, the Winamp way
A skin is images, not a color scheme: backgrounds for the chat and sidebar, buttons drawn from a sprite sheet, borders built from repeating edges, even the UI font. Skins are single .bvskin files you can hand to a friend — and a skin editor ships alongside. So you can make one too!
06
Speaks your language
A full English and Korean (한국어) interface, switchable live, and chat renders any script no matter your UI language. Add more with a drop-in language pack — no rebuild required.
07
Plugins
A set of additional functionalities that can be enabled or disabled per client.
Such as
- Polls
- Vote to kick
- Soundboard
- Realtime Transcription
- Voice Effects
- Screen Sharing
- Minigame ROMs
08
Tools
Sometimes you need things like a timer to keep track of when you have to stop playing games...
09
Friends
If you meet someone in a public room the path to friendship and DM's is a simple as a friend request, and with that some layers of protection against someone you might not want to be your friend.
Simple and easy
Voice starts the moment you join (although muted), mixed across everyone in the room so it feels like you're all on one couch. Noise reduction control sliders allow you to dial in the quality and avoid sounds of fans, the keyboard, and the roommate before your mic ever hits the wire.
If someone in the room is annoying or just noisy you can mute them for yourself, or room admin can mute them for everyone (sometimes kids don't know they are loud and don't know how to mute themselves).
Common features you would expect
You can enter text message, emojis, share images, share links, gifs, and set when those message expired or cached on your machine.
Other features
- room admins
- mute members
- kick member
- adjust volume of member
- friend request
- send file to member
- mute for me
- block member
- vote kick
01
PIN-locked controls
Every parental setting lives behind a 4-digit PIN in an encrypted settings file — turn off image sharing, file transfers, DMs or voice per device. Set the PIN once; it re-locks itself the moment you close Preferences.
03
Controls
-
Profanity Filter
An on-device profanity filter cleans language both ways — sent and received — and two bundled models scan every image for explicit content before it ever renders. It all runs locally on your machine; nothing is uploaded to check it.
-
Curfew
Set an allowed time window and BeebleVox only runs inside it — checked against trusted network time, so nudging the system clock won't buy an extra hour. When the window closes it leaves the room cleanly and bows out.
-
Image Sharing
Hides the ability to share images and blocks any incoming messages that contain images.
-
GIF Sharing
Hides the ability to share Gifs and blocks any incoming messages that contain Gifs.
-
NSFW Image blocking
This enables a combo of popular machine learning models to process / filter each incoming image or GIF, including the avatars of users, (this is all run locally on the machine using the CPU and is only processed and loaded into memory if this is enabled), if it's scored high then its block, if its scored low the image is blurred with a warning that the user then needs to click to reveal the contents.
-
File Sharing
Hides the ability to share files and blocks any incoming messages that contain files.
-
Direct Messages
Disable or enable the DM feature altogether.
-
Screen Sharing
Disable or enable the ability to share a screen from a client or see a shared screen from another client.
-
Link Sharing
Strip out any urls or links that get shared in a message.
-
Voice Sharing
You can remove the ability for a user to use the mic at all which effectively makes the rooms act as a text only for the user.
-
Chat Log Capture
This will store the messages of rooms locally on the machine with a timestamp into a text file for a parent to review if they have concerns about topics being discussed in a room.
-
Voice Session Capture
THIS ONLY APPLIES TO THE CLIENT THAT HAS THIS ENABLED, IT WILL NOT CAPTURE VOICE OF OTHER USERS IN THE ROOM. In case a parent / guardian wants to hear how their user is behaving in a room.
“I like turtles”
Download BeebleVox
Download BeebleVox for your OS. It's free, open source, no data logs or reporting and nothing to sign up for.
Skins!
Growing up I used a program called WinAmp and I used it to listen to .mp3 files. One of the coolest things about it was the fact that you could change the appearance of the UI to include images or "skins" of whatever thing you liked (ex. Anime, guilty as charged).
I wanted to add this sort of feature to BeebleVox so I created the SkinEditor which is a separate tool that can be used to create or edit existing skins!
Make a skin
The skin editor is a separate, standalone app: load an image, drag a crop onto a slot, pick your colours, and watch a mock BeebleVox update as you go. It writes the .bvskin file the app reads, so you never touch a config file. It needs nothing installed and talks to no network.
Featured Skins
Download the BeebleVox Skin Editor
Download The BeebleVox Skin Editor and make some cool skins!