Google adds sights, sounds to Gmail chat

One of the most oft-requested, but inexplicably absent, features for Google Talk has been the ability to have an audio/video conference with other users. And although Google Talk still remains the only mainstream IM client on Windows which lacks the ability to have an audio/video conference, Google has now added this feature to Gmail itself.

Using a proprietary browser plugin (a 2.4MB download), that’s compatible with Safari 3.x and Firefox 2.x and above on the Mac, the web-based chat client in Gmail now offers users the additional capabilities of having a two-way audio and video chat with other people on their contact list (as long as they have a Gmail account and have the plugin installed).

Although it offers some neat features like the ability to “pop-out” the chat widget and fullscreen support, there are some limitations too. For one thing, it only supports two-way chats, so you can’t hold a conference with more than a single person at the same time. For another, you can’t record these chats, although that’s only a minor quibble.

On the plus side, though, these features are free of charge and cross-platform by their very nature (though it’s not available on Linux yet). If they haven’t yet appeared in your Gmail account, just give it a day or two. Read on to see how well it works in the real world.

I decided to give this a try and downloaded and installed the plugin from Google’s website. After quitting and relaunching Safari, it automatically took me to the Settings section in Gmail, which now had additional options for the audio/video chat module. Leaving it at the default settings, I invited Dan Moren to a video chat.

However, even after having installed the plugin, Gmail kept asking him to reinstall it when he tried to use it with Safari. We’re guessing there might have been some conflict with the Safari Stand InputManager hack he uses. It did work like a charm in Firefox 3.0 for him though.

And when I say it worked like a charm, I mean it was absolutely awesome! We’d expected it to be a quality service, what with it being from the Google camp, but neither of us were quite prepared for how well implemented it turned out to be. The video quality is almost as good as what Skype offers and is pretty watchable even in fullscreen mode. Both the audio and video transmission were working fine and without any lags even on my 512Kbps connection. It definitely works as advertised.

Check out the demonstration of the new service (by an overexcited Google engineer) in the YouTube video embedded below and then visit the Official Gmail Blog for more details.