Terminal Phone
E2EE Walkie Talkie from the Command Line
Details
- External ID
- 47164270
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Terminal Phone
- Website domain
- gitlab.com
- Launched
- Feb. 26, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 322
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9784366576819407
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
TerminalPhone is a single, self-contained Bash script that provides anonymous, end-to-end encrypted voice and text communication between two parties over the Tor network. It operates as a walkie-talkie: you record a voice message, and it is compressed, encrypted, and transmitted to the remote party as a single unit. You can also send encrypted text messages during a call. No server infrastructure, no accounts, no phone numbers. Your Tor hidden service .onion address is your identity.
Enrichment
- Theme
- voice dictation and control tools
- Vertical
- —
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- end-to-end encrypted walkie talkie for command line
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a Bash script wrapping readily available command-line utilities including Tor hidden services, SoX for audio, and GPG/OpenSSL for encryption.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: letscage (Rust-based similar design), Firefox Send / ffsend (file sharing), Tor (for anonymity/privacy comparisons)
Concerns raised: Lacks post-quantum cryptography, Latency issues from Tor routing, Tor blocked/perceived as nefarious in enterprise/controlled networks, Not real-time capability, Anonymity vs speed tradeoff unclear
Feature requests: Configurable single-hop Tor mode for speed (sacrificing anonymity), Sub-6kbps audio encoding (2kbps if possible), Playable speed adjustment on receive side to reduce latency, Opus DRED error correction scheme integration for robustness, Authorized Tor client key export functionality
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 124 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 125 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 104 days after the earliest competitor.
- Simple Terminal Voice Recorder · hn · 2026-03-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- X2Chat · ph · 2026-09-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- rawgram · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Walkie · ph · 2026-09-22 · 76 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Remote Terminal · ph · 2026-09-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- NumBan · ph · 2026-09-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- SecretNote — P2P Chat · ph · 2026-09-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Local Whisper · ph · 2026-09-17 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.