Anonymous chat in Canada — free, voice or text

Canada on HearMe is two languages and six time zones. Winters are long and nights are longer, and midnight in January is a plain reason to want someone to talk to: it is dark, it is cold, and everyone you know is asleep. Text or voice, no camera, no sign-up.

The table below uses Eastern time. At 9pm in Toronto, the US East Coast is in the same hour, the UK is at 2am, India is at 7:30am, and the Philippines and Australia are in their working day. Whether anyone is on HearMe at your hour is the live count at the top of the page, not a promise on this one.

Times are standard time; daylight saving shifts some of these by an hour for part of the year. 'Evening' is 6pm to midnight. This table is only about clocks: how many people are on HearMe right now is the live count at the top of the page, and we print no other number.

English and French. The 1:1 country filter narrows the queue to Canada; a chat is in whichever language the two of you pick. There is no French interface yet; the site's menus are in English or one of the other seven languages.

Canada also speaks Punjabi, Tagalog, Mandarin, Cantonese and Arabic, and the site's interface is available in Filipino and Arabic. The Canadian late night is the Philippine morning and the Indian morning by the clock.

Nobody can tell you what a stranger will say, but the interest tags people pick and the topics that recur in the General room give a fair idea. If you want a conversation on one of these, set the tag before you start; the matcher prefers someone who picked the same.

• Weather and the season, because it decides everything else.
• Hockey from October to June, and the Raptors and Jays the rest of the year.
• Rent, immigration paperwork, and the first winter after arriving.
• University and co-op terms, and the gap between them.
• The US, from the outside.
• Late-night loneliness. Late-night chat has more.

Canadian mobile data is expensive, and audio-only voice helps: a call uses a fraction of a video call's data. Text is nearly free. Rural connections that cannot connect two devices directly fall back to a relay server that passes audio through without storing it. Headphones fix echo on a laptop. Nothing to install; the site runs in the phone browser and can be pinned to the home screen.

From Canada, the US is in the same hour and the UK is in your afternoon. The Canadian late night is when Asia wakes up: the Philippines at 10am when it is 9pm in Toronto, India at 7:30am. The country filter narrows the 1:1 queue. If you are trying to make friends in other countries, the table above is the honest guide to when they are awake.

HearMe is 18+ and enforces it. Guests never give a name, email or phone number; the flag comes from the connection and shows the country only, never the province or city. Text is held for 24 hours for reports and then deleted; voice is never recorded and every 1:1 call is private; only a report sends a short clip from just before it for review. No camera exists on the site. A block stops you being matched with that person again; bans hold by account, device and network.