VoIP with Google Talk -- First Impressions

[Jeff]

I had a chance to test Google Talk's VoIP features last night with Spike, and was very impressed. The voice quality was excellent, with no perceptable latency, noise or sputtering. As good or better than Skype or Gizmo Project.

Google Talk uses an open standard for voice communications, and according to information provided to developers, they are working closely with SIPPHONE (creators of Gizmo Project).

Personally, I'd like to see a record button (maybe with integrated podcast publishing), and a conferencing option for multi-point chat.

Anyone else give it a try? What do you like? What do you dislike?

[David]

Yeah, had a long conversation with Spike last night. (Until mom came down and yelled at me at 3. =P)

Him being on a DSL connection and me on a 4mbit cable link, we tried out best to stress our connections, but the amount of created lag would break the conversation enough to notice; I believe the only way we could even tell was when I had my music on and Spike could hear it through my mic.

Overall it was smooth, you can't do a conversation with more than one person, and several times we had to restart GT because one of our mic's was not correctly recognized by the application. But overall, it looks very promising.

[stev02]

I think it is very good but Trillian's Audio/Video is far better. Jeff, your suggestions were awesome..."I'd like to see a record button (maybe with integrated podcast publishing), and a conferencing option for multi-point chat."

[Spike]

Yep, I was super-impressed with the quality, both with Jeff and Dave, especially being on one of the slowest broadband connections. (SBC Yahoo! DSL, 386kbs/128kbs) I will definately use it again.

I also asked Google about their conferencing feature. Here's what they said to me in a direct e-mail:

Originally Posted by Google Help Team E-mail

Additionally, while Google Talk doesn't currently support the
functionality to support conference calls as you've requested, we are
testing many new things.

That pretty much sounds like they have more stuff in the works for GT, but didn't want to really give us any idea of exactly what.

I have full confidence in Google that they will continue to make this product far better and far more feature-rich, we just need to be patient about it.