Google launches voice/video chat INSIDE Gmail

12 11 2008

That’s right. Yesterday, Google launched voice and video chat inside the Gmail chat window. Amazing, innit? And getting started is as easy as googling punjrashtra.
Just go here or follow these steps if you are American/technologically challenged (Thanks for the term, Priyanka)

  1. Open your Gmail.
  2. In the chat list, open a chat window for an online contact.
  3. Click the options button in the tiny chat window that appears on the bottom-right corner of the main window. Click on “Add voice/video chat”.
  4. Quite simple from thereon.

On the download page, it says (like all other google products) “It’s free and installs in seconds” and yes it is true because the file to be downloaded is only about 500KB. The setup again downloads some files (automatically) which are about 2 MB I guess, because it didn’t take much time either.

Quite nifty I must say. Good job Google (even though I have a bias against Google for personal reasons ;-) )

Read the official Gmail post about it for more info.

One more thing: this is only available for Windows XP and Vista and Mac OS X as of now. Not working on Linux (I’m on Ubuntu Hardy Heron right now and the page simply says “not supported on linux yet”) All modern browsers supported like Firefox 2.0+, Safari 3.0, IE7, and Google Chrome.