About PandaChat

Because pandas don’t hurry. They sit, they chew, they look at you for a while, and nobody has ever seen one sprint at a stranger. We wanted a random video site with some of that temperament, one where the quick part is getting connected and everything around the call can go at your speed.

In practice that means you can start on voice before showing your face, browse Who’s online at your own pace instead of taking whoever comes next, and call back the people you liked rather than losing them.

None of that makes a call slow. Random matching is still quick, and calls use free matches and then coins like anything else that costs money to run. The patience is in the parts around the call: the ways in, the way back, and not having to perform on camera before you’re ready.

So the panda stayed. It’s on the logo and in the name. It is also, admittedly, a bit of a joke at our own expense. A panda isn’t the most obvious mascot for a phone call. It does, however, look very comfortable sitting still, and that’s the mood we were after.

PandaChat puts two strangers on a call together, chosen at random from whoever is around, and it does it in a browser tab rather than an installed app. Video is the starting mode, voice and text are the alternatives, and following someone means you can ring them again another day.

That’s the whole thing. Around it sit a few supporting pieces: the Who’s online list for when you’d rather choose than leave it to chance, profiles with a message button and a video button, a message list for conversations that carry on between calls, and a Live section where you can watch one person on camera and send a gift if you feel like it. The features page lists every one of them with a line on how it works.

If you came here from a search for the Panda Video Chat home page, that’s where calls actually start. This page is about the thinking behind it.

Anyone who likes meeting new people in small doses, a few minutes at a time, with no plan for where it goes. That covers more of us than you’d think: the night-shift worker on a quiet break, the student practising English before an exam, the person who just moved cities and hasn’t met anyone yet.

Better to hear this now than after a dozen calls. PandaChat isn’t a dating service, and it won’t help you arrange to meet anyone. There are no matchmaking questionnaires and no promises about who you’ll be paired with.

It isn’t a group chat. There are no rooms where twenty people talk over each other; every call has two people in it. The Live section lets many people watch one person, but that’s watching, not a group conversation.

And it isn’t a store app. If you were hoping to find PandaChat between the games and the banking apps on your phone, you won’t; it lives in the browser, and the PandaChat app page shows how to put an icon on your home screen so it feels much the same.

It also isn’t a place for anyone who wants to make someone else uncomfortable. If that’s what you’re here for, expect people to hang up on you, block you and report you.

A lot of sites in this corner of the internet promise things they can’t check. We’ve tried to keep a short list of what we won’t claim, so that the things we do say carry some weight.

Mostly as a matter of control. You decide whether your camera is on, what’s in the frame, what you say and when the call ends. Our job is to make those decisions easy: a hang-up that works immediately, and report and block options on every profile.

We don’t ask guests for a name, email or phone number to start, which means there’s less about you on the site to begin with. The rest is common sense, and we’ve written it down anyway on staying safe on a call: what the other person can see, what to keep off camera, and what to do when someone asks for money or your social accounts.

If something happens that the report button can’t cover, write to us. Emails to support go to the people who run the site.

People write our name three ways, and all three are us. Panda Video Chat is the full name you’ll see in page titles. PandaChat is the short form, one word, the way it appears on the logo. Panda Chat, with a space, is how a fair few people type it into a search box.

We don’t mind which you use. If you typed any of them and ended up here, you’re in the right place, and the Start button works the same way whatever you called it on the way in. For a closer look at what a first call involves, the Panda Video Chat explainer goes minute by minute.

Email is the way in: [email protected]. Questions about coins, a problem with a call, an idea for a feature, a report that needs more explanation than the options on a profile allow, all of it goes to the same address.

Before writing about a technical problem, the contact page lists a few quick fixes worth trying first and what to include so we can help faster. And if you just want to see how the screens fit together, how PandaChat works walks through them in order.