Yes, but almost never in the way people expect. The chime is the part of a video doorbell that causes the most returns, because the three ways of doing it are incompatible with each other and nobody explains that on the box.
Let us start with what the three options actually are.
Option one: a wireless plug-in chime that ships with the doorbell. This is a small speaker you plug into a socket inside the house. The doorbell and the chime pair to each other directly, usually on 433 MHz or a similar sub-GHz band rather than on your Wi-Fi. It works with any doorbell, it needs no wiring, and it is the default answer for battery-powered models. The weakness is range and placement: one chime in the hallway may not be audible in a back bedroom or a garden office, and most systems only support one or two paired chimes.
Option two: reuse the existing mechanical chime in your hallway. This is what people mean when they ask "will it work with my chime". A traditional chime is not a speaker, it is a solenoid and a striker plate. It is powered by a low-voltage transformer, typically 8 to 24 V AC, and pressing the doorbell momentarily completes that circuit so the plunger fires. For a video doorbell to drive it, the doorbell has to sit in that circuit and be able to close it — which means it must be wired, and the transformer must be able to supply the doorbell's own standby current as well. Battery video doorbells generally cannot do this at all, because they are not in the circuit. This is the single most common mismatch: someone buys a battery doorbell and expects the old ding-dong to ring.
There is a second failure that is more subtle. Even when a wired video doorbell is designed to drive an existing chime, the doorbell needs a small amount of current to stay alive, and it draws that by leaking a little through the chime circuit. At low volume this is fine. At higher loads the solenoid gets enough current to buzz or to fire weakly and continuously, which is the famous "my chime hums after I fitted a video doorbell" complaint. The fix is either the jumper wire or diode the manufacturer ships for exactly this purpose, or a transformer with more headroom.
Option three: use a phone, a smart display or a smart speaker instead of a chime. The doorbell pushes a notification, and an Alexa or Google device announces it. This costs nothing extra if you already own those, it works from anywhere in the world, and it is genuinely useful if you are often away. It is also the least reliable as an actual doorbell: notifications depend on the vendor's cloud, on your phone's Do Not Disturb settings, and on your Wi-Fi behaving. If the internet is down, a cloud-based chime does not ring, whereas a local wireless chime still does.
Which one should you choose? It depends on what you already have.
If you are replacing an existing wired doorbell and you want to keep the old chime: check two things before buying. The voltage and VA rating of your transformer, and whether the doorbell's spec sheet explicitly says it supports an existing mechanical chime. Most models that do will give you a required rating, commonly 16 V AC at 10 VA or 30 VA. If your transformer is an old 8 V bell transformer, it will not be enough and you will get dropouts, reboots, or a chime that sounds like a wet cough. Replacing the transformer is normally a ten-minute job at the consumer unit or wherever the bell transformer lives, and it solves a surprising number of "my video doorbell keeps disconnecting" problems.
If you have no existing doorbell, or you are in a flat, or you are renting: battery doorbell plus the included wireless plug-in chime. You lose the ability to drive a mechanical chime and you accept that the unit needs charging every few months, but you gain the ability to install it in twenty minutes without touching a wire.
If you want the doorbell to be audible in more than one room: check how many chimes the system supports before you buy. Some ecosystems allow one, some allow several, and some let you use a smart speaker in each room as an additional chime, which is usually the cheapest way to get whole-home coverage.
One honest note about expectations. Do not buy a video doorbell primarily because you imagine answering the door from your office and telling the courier where to leave the parcel. Two-way audio over a mobile connection has enough latency that conversations feel awkward, and the courier will usually have walked away before you finish a sentence. The chime and the recording are what you will actually use every day.
I work on the manufacturing side, so I am biased toward the boring answer: decide how you want it to ring before you choose the model, not after. Drivability of an existing chime is a hardware property, and it is the one you cannot fix with an app update.
If you are sourcing rather than buying one for yourself, the specs that matter are chime output type, whether an existing mechanical chime is supported, the transformer range, and how many wireless chimes can be paired. Our range is here: https://xingliaoshop.com/product-category/smart-video-doorbell/
Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.
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