The Hindu : Business : Google finds its voice

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Aug 26, 2005

Business

Business

Google finds its voice

Anand Parthasarathy

New free tool combines instant messaging and Net telephony

BANGALORE: The sultan of search engines is talking — and how! Google is offering for free download, a new tool that seamlessly combines instant messaging services with the ability to exchange Internet voice calls with other holders of its GMail web mail account.

The small programme — less than a megabyte — can be downloaded in about 3 minutes, with a dial-up connection, from www.google.com/talk and as long as you have a GMail account, you can instantly initiate chat with others on your `buddy' list. If both have PCs equipped with a sound card with headphones and a mike (or alternately a headset) — you can also launch a voice conversation. Google is a late entrant in this arena: AOL, Yahoo and MSN have millions of users between them for their free instant messaging (IM) services; while the Luxembourg-based Skype has 51 million users of its free Internet telephone tool. But while cannily combining these compelling applications, Google seems to have gone where no service provider has gone before — into the world of `open' standards: It relies on the so-called ``Jabber'' protocol that opens up the possibility that Google Talk users can, in the not-to-distant future, chat with customers of other competing services. Currently, Yahoo, MSN and AOL chat is not interoperable, but Google says it is talking to them.

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