~TECH-BYTES~

Exciting News!

Google Talk users can now make free international phone calls!

How it Works

Adding phone numbers to your Google Talk contact list

1)     To start, launch Google Talk on your desktop

2)     Add contacts the same way you usually do: click on the Add button to add a friend

3)     Type in the phone number of the person you want to call in the following format.

Use full phone number, including country code and area code:

phonenumber@talkster.gtalk2voip.com

Example: for UK, use 442071234567@talkster.gtalk2voip.com or for USA , use 12125551212@talkster.gtalk2voip.com

(Note: be sure to check the list of Talkster’s supported countries to check if the friend you want to call is in one of the available countries)

4)     You’ll get a confirmation from Talkster with instructions.

We assign a local Talkster number for your friend in their country. Your friends will use Talkster phone numbers to call-in to be connected with you.

5)     If you are calling your friend on a mobile phone, he will receive an SMS with his Talkster call-in number for you. Otherwise, let him know the Talkster number by IM or email.

Make calls from your Google Talk

1)     Click on your friend’s number in your Google Talk Contact List

2)     Click on the Call button to start the call with your friend

3)     Talkster will dial out to your friend from Google Talk

4)     When your friend answers, you will have 10 seconds to check to see if he’s available to talk. Tell him to hang up and call right back, using his local Talkster phone number for you.

5)     You wait while your friend hangs up and calls back using his local number for you. (If he doesn’t know his number, send it to him by email or IM.)

6)     As soon as your friend calls in, we connect you and you can talk as long as you want for FREE.

7)     When you’re done, you just end the call!

    Tell your friend to save his Talkster call-in number in his phone so he can use it whenever you want to call him from Google Talk.

You can call as often as you like and talk as long as you like. There are no catches, no limits, and no conditions!

Google today launched a new version of Google Talk for iPhone and iPod Touch that includes no new features but looks slightly more pleasing than the regular Flash based Google Talk gadget.

If you like to use the new iPhone version of Google Talk gadget on a desktop browser or your Firefox sidebar, just use the following links.

For Google Accounts / Gmail users: http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/m

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There’s a new flavor of Google Talk: the Labs edition, a desktop client that looks very similar to the Google Talk gadget and has most of its features. The application doesn’t support voice chat or file transfer, but it has some new features: it lets you launch Google Calendar and Orkut, while including notifications for Google Calendar events and Orkut scraps. The new Google Talk uses WebKit to render some parts of the interface.

I don’t find too many reasons why someone would switch from the full-featured client to the Labs edition: group chats, smilies, tabs, while the missing features are more important. A better decisions would have been to integrate these new features in the desktop client, instead of releasing a separate application. Now we have four different flavors of Google Talk: the original client, Gmail Chat, the gadget and the Labs edition.

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14 months ago, when Google added Vista support for its instant messaging client, nobody anticipated a long period with no updates. According to a Google engineer, the desktop client hasn’t been abandoned and we should expect a completely new version of Google Talk. While I couldn’t find when it will be released or the new features, it’s reassuring to hear that Google is still working on GTalk.

Some of the most popular features requested by users are already available in the online interfaces: group chats, invisible mode, AIM integration, so we should expect to find them in a new release of Google Talk. Other features are already standard in other IM clients: video conferencing, conference calls, phone calls.

Last year, a presentation for Google Apps inadvertently included a screenshot of Google Talk enhanced with the ability to make phone calls. In the comments, someone informed us that “internally at Google, this feature is already active since long”.

“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” Douglas Adams, Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

Google now offers instant machine translation in Google Talk, a step on the road to the ultimate Babel Fish.

The new service is used by adding a translation bot to a Google Talk chat, for example adding en2zh@bot.talk.google.com provides a translation from English to Chinese. The bot can be used as a direct look up tool for a translation, or in a group chat for translation on the fly as part of a conversation. For a two way conversation two bots are required, one for the English to other language translation, and one for the other language back into English.

A full list of languages available (and codes) can be found on the Google Talk blog here. The service also supports translation from non-English languages to other non-English languages as well, for example French to German and back again.

Lets hope that unlike the Babel Fish in Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy that Google Talk doesn’t start any conflicts; given that the service is pulling data from Google Translate some of those translations may end up being rather interesting to say the least.