Anonymous chat in the USA — free, voice or text

The USA on HearMe is four time zones wide, which changes how the site feels from there: someone in the country is awake for more of the day than in any single-zone country, and 11pm on the East Coast is 8pm in California. The US is also where the reflex 'random chat means video' is strongest, because that is what the American sites all became. HearMe is the no-camera version: text or voice, no account, no app, and the same one-tap Next.

There is no single American evening: when it is 9pm in New York it is 6pm in Los Angeles. The table below uses Eastern time and shows who is awake at that hour — the UK and Germany are in the small hours, India is at 7:30am, and the Philippines and Australia are in their daytime. How many people are on HearMe at any hour is the live count at the top of the page; we do not print busy hours we have not measured.

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 Spanish. The site's interface is available in Spanish; Latin America shares most of the US's hours, and Brazil is the exception, speaking Portuguese, and the Brazil page covers that.

By the clock, an American morning is the Indian and Philippine evening, which is when someone practising English is most likely to be awake. If you are in the US and patient with accents, that page explains how to be useful.

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.

• Work and money: shifts, rent, tips, the job you are thinking of quitting.
• College, dorms, finals week, and the summer after.
• Sports by region: NFL and college football in the fall, NBA all winter, baseball all summer.
• Music and what is on your playlist.
• Being awake at 3am with nobody to talk to. The late-night chat page is written for exactly that.
• Politics, if you must. Next is one tap.

Phone or desktop, either works. A voice call is audio-only and uses a fraction of what a video call would, which matters on a capped phone plan. If your carrier's network cannot connect two phones directly, a relay server passes the audio through without storing it. Headphones fix echo on a laptop with a built-in mic. There is nothing to install: HearMe runs in Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge and can be pinned to a home screen.

From the US, the 1:1 queue is worldwide by default, and the country filter is how you aim at one place. Canada is in the same hours. The UK and Germany overlap with the American afternoon. India, Pakistan and the Philippines overlap with the American late night and early morning, so 2am Eastern is the American hour that lines up with an Asian evening by the clock. There is one room, General, for everyone. See make international friends for how to do it well.

HearMe is 18+ and enforces it by blocking, warning and banning on signs of an under-18 user. Guests give no name, email or phone number. Your state or city is never shown; the flag comes from the connection and is the country only. Text is kept 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. There is no camera on the site, so nobody can ask you to turn one on. A block stops you being matched with that person again; bans hold by account, device and network, not just by nickname.