One of the things voice chat does naturally that few other formats do is put you in real-time conversation with someone half the world away, with no setup beyond pressing a button. Worth using on purpose.
A few small things to know.
The country filter on XES is a soft preference, not a hard filter. Adding a country to your preferred list adds points to anyone matching from that country in the scoring, but doesn’t exclude everyone else. So you’ll mostly get matches from the countries you preferred, but not always. If you want a strict version, use the excluded countries field instead — that’s the hard one.
Time zones do a lot of the work. If you’re in the UK at 9pm and you want to talk to someone in Japan, you’re asking them to be awake at 6am their time. There will be some early risers in the queue; there will be a lot more if you queue at 1pm your time, which is 10pm theirs. The site is meaningfully more international between 4pm and 11pm UK time because that window overlaps with both the US west coast and most of Asia. If your queue feels homogeneous, change when you’re queueing.
Once you’re actually in a call, ask about the place, not the person. “What’s the weather like there” is fine; “what’s a thing about your city most people get wrong” is better. Anything that gets the other person describing somewhere they live tends to spark twenty minutes of real conversation, partly because places are easier to talk about than selves, and partly because people genuinely like talking about where they’re from.
The other thing worth knowing: language practice is a legitimate use of the country filter. People who’ve set it up because they’re learning Spanish or Japanese or Portuguese often say so in their bio, which is a strong sign you can match them up with people who’ve done the reverse. The matcher rewards interest overlap, so “language exchange” in your interests is the easiest way to find similar people.
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