Gmail gets voice and video chat

By Tim Conneally | Published November 11, 2008, 6:07 PM

Google today announced an enhancement to Gmail that allows voice and video chat to take place directly within the client.

In Gmail chat, the tag under the conversation window normally titled "options," is replaced by the "video and more" tag. Clicking on this expands a menu that can allow voice or video chats to take place alongside email and text chats at any time.

To enable Google Talk in Gmail, you first download and install a 1.4 MB browser plug-in (available here). In the official Google Blog, software engineer Justin Uberti says Gmail voice and video was designed using XMPP, RTP and H.264 so third party apps and networks can choose to interoperate.

The rollout will not make voice and video immediately available to all Gmail users, and could take one to two more days before the feature is added.

Google video chat screenshot

Comments

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super stvar. gmail je najbolji

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Yeah ... I don't get the concept of adding all of these bells and whistles to webmail -- yet... Now ... if you opened this up in Chrome with Google's little Prism-style Webapp instancing thing (no idea how to express what I'm saying) -- then this is conceptually a smart idea... as long as you don't think of this as a web-based chat ...

It's like Skype adding in an e-mail client... right? Or Yahoo! Messenger letting you check your e-mail also, right?

Just a weird concept... and also a good one for people who do not have permission to install applications on the computer that they are using -- this way they can have a pretty nice video chat option.

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I don't really see much use for this. I for one would not want to have a voice or video chat with someone when checking my email. Text chat is fine (very useful in fact).

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maybee it'll be in trillian astra

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This is a great feature but I really don't understand why they launched the video functionality in Gmail before Talk.

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