Yeah you heard me, TeamSpeak.
If this name gives you PTSD, congratulations, YOU ARE OLD.
To the younglings and the uneducated among us, TeamSpeak (TS) is a proprietary voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) application for audio communication on a connected server.
TeamSpeak was created in 1999 by a group of friends, and officially released in 2001. It was one of the first VoIP communication systems that was used en-mass in gaming platforms and communities! By 2009, the company behind TS, started working on the TeamSpeak 3 client, which was a new generation for the platform, with a lot more features than before and a much nicer and cleaner UI.
TS3 took quite a while to be developed, funnily enough it took 3 years before the first public release, as until 2011, it was in an 'open beta' status.
The first cool thing about TS3 is that it introduced Unique Identifiers which was basically a way for users to be able to keep their permissions without having to register at a server, making accessing servers much more frictionless.
And now speaking of permissions, TeamSpeak 3 introduced them as well. It was a new way of managing users, using a two numbers:
- Power
- Needed Power
Essentially, a user (or group of users) would require a specific amount of power to access a permission. For example, if your power was 5, and there was a permission to send messages of 10, your power would need to be at least 10 or above to send messages. You could also then add a permission at 11 to send files via messages and so forth.
This allowed for a cleaner permission system with more capabilities and a much cleaner interface for both the admins and the users.
Finally, another really cool feature of TeamSpeak was the 3D voice effects. You could very easily position audio sources (so people yapping) extremely easily with a very simple yet powerful 3D system, so that you can literally do the meme of "Mozart in your left ear, Nuclear Alarms in your right ear".
This was great for radio-esq systems where you'd have your radio on only the left ear, and have the game be stereo, thus allowing you to actually simulate wearing an earphone for the radio. Better yet, you could even position it in 3D rather than just pan left-right, so you could simulate wearing the actual radio receiver on your body. It was and still is pretty cool!
TeamSpeak 3 also had a great plethora of plugins, that could integrate with pretty much everything, so you could have radio effects, or even position people in real time, in 3D space when a game didn't have a VOIP system it self. Really cool stuff for its time!
TeamSpeak 5
In 2019, the TeamSpeak developers would announce that they will be working from the ground on remaking TeamSpeak, and through social media over time they would tease much needed features to bring TS to the modern 2025 chatting experience.
A few hours before posting this post, TeamSpeak announced on Twitter,
"It's real, It's coming."
with an image of the client in the 'screen share' feature on a call. The same social media account has been teasing for the past few months this feature, so I assume the many people interested into TS, are pretty excited!
My Thoughts
I first used TeamSpeak3 literally years ago, probably around 2015-2016 to login to Minecraft servers communities and find 'guilds', and I made a 'myTeamSpeak' account at around 2018. I didn't use TeamSpeak much because by the time I found out about TeamSpeak, Discord was already a rising star (and I've been on Discord since summer 2015, yikes, I am a boomer as well) but I did use TS3 for FiveM server communications and Air Traffic Control for FSX, as the server funcionality for frequencies and channels was quite superior to what discord offering at the time.
Wow I feel really old now.
I did try out the new beta TeamSpeak 5 client for a while, some months ago just to see what's up, and it feels like good-old TS3 with a new fancy UI and some extra stuff more dedicated to having contacts and upgrading the server browser to be a bit more accessible, almost like how servers & channels are done in apps like Discord or Slack.
I am excited to see what TS5 has to offer, and while I don't think it will ever replace Discord again, as the fact that you need your own infra to run a TS5 server will throw a lot of people off, I still think that it can bring TeamSpeak back to being a solid alternative to Discord, both for the plugins and 3D audio system that Discord doesn't have, but also for having a more secure & advanced way to communicate with your friends.
Closing
Before I end this post, I'd like to shout out Mumble, an open source alternative to TeamSpeak with a very TS3-esq UI. If you really want a similar experience to the VoIP features TS has, but without the proprietary stuff (and thus much better privacy in my opinion) Mumble is a solid alternative. Though I think Mumble has much much less a-chance of becoming mainstream ever, even compared to TS.
Are you going to use TeamSpeak again, or even just try out for the first time?