Gmail launching voice and video chat!

Google just updated their “What’s New” page for Gmail with information about a new feature called “Voice and Video Chat“. The voice and video chat plugin that you must download in order to use the feature incorporates a technology called Vidyo.

Vidyo provides for high-quality, low-latency, highly resilient, broad-based deployments over general-purpose networks with the introduction of the first multi-point video conferencing solution designed to work like the Internet itself. — vidyo.com

Google Talk has let people do voice conversations for a long time, but the web version of the service in Gmail has always been media-free. This new feature lets you do both voice and video, taking it one step past Google Talk’s voice-only feature. That said, the feature still isn’t enabled in my Gmail, but it must be extremely close to coming online.

[image from Google]

The “learn more” page for this new feature shows a video of the new feature in action. Click here to watch the video.

Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• Download the Gmail voice and video chat plug-in, quit all open browser windows, and install the plug-in.
• Sign in to Gmail.
• In the Chat section of your Gmail, select the contact you want to call. If they have a camera icon next to their name, you can make a voice or video call to them; just click Video & more.

If your friend doesn’t have a camera next to their name in your chat list, you can invite them to download the Gmail voice and video chat plug-in from the Video & more menu in a chat window. Even if your friend doesn’t have a video camera, you can still make a voice call or a 1-way video call.

The new feature is very simple to install, and easy to use. This feature is a long time coming for Google Talk, and I’m excited to see it finally arrive.

Updated: I originally attributed the wrong company behind Google’s new feature. It’s actually Vidyo (as see in the article right now).