Engage's Jitter Buffer

Like most engineering types, us VoIP people often babble on about all kinds of technical things that, on the surface, mean very little to non-nerdy type. But, oftentimes, the things we feel so passionate about ARE important to folks who use our software. But we have a hard time getting our point across.

One of these techie things is a jitter buffer.

A jitter buffer is just that (but not!) - a buffer that deals with jitter. (Actually, the "not" piece comes in because its actually a "de-jitter" buffer.)

Now, it'd be lovely if that was the end of the explanation but, honestly, the above is not an explanation at all. So, let's talk about this.

OK, so, to get your voice from your device to someone else over the network we have to do a whole lot of stuff. This includes things like capturing what you've said from the microphone, chopping that audio up into bite-sized chunks, and transmitting them in packets across the network.

On the receiving end, these chunks are stitched together into a stream of audio that makes its way to the speaker output and, voila!, your voice comes out.