Callroulette

What it is

Talk to a random person or someone near you. It's just like Chatroulette, except with phones (and less genitalia).

For location-based matching, we put you with someone in your same area code.

How to use it

Just call in and follow any voice prompts. We may put you on hold if we don't have enough people to match you with. Press pound ("#") to move to the next person.

Why are we doing this?

Our research group is interested in the use of technology for development. We are building a low-cost, low-power cell phone base station platform for deployment in underserved areas. Once you set up your own cell phone tower, you can do a lot of cool things, like run a chatroulette service.

In this particular project, we are studying how choice and context affect the quality of online interactions. We will be deploying this service in a small isolated cell phone network at an upcoming event where we expect to have several thousand users. We're hoping the Internet can help us test how our system performs under load before the real deployment so we can work out all the bugs.