Google has announced support for the following features in GTalk, File Transfer, Voicemail and Music status Display.Here are the new features in Gtalk.
Support for FileTransfer has been there in libjingle, the library that Google released to the open source community for quite sometime. The implementation in Gtalk has taken a while, however the good news is it is there now.
Voicemail is a cool new feature in Gtalk. When you try to call a contact in Gtalk and the contact doesn't answer the call, you get to record a voice message for the contact. The message is then delivered to the contact's gmail id as a Mp3 file. I like the Voice mail greeting message, "The person you are calling is not available, please leave a message at the meep, meeeeep".
Music Status Display allows you to show your contacts the album that you are currently listening to in your windows media player. For some reason, Gtalk seems to support display of title from windows media player and not from real media player.It would be nice if it could pick it up from any media player, like for example, real media player and show the status. Or could it be that Gtalk has drawn the direction and open source developers can value add by providing enhancements that would provide status from any media player?
If you think the above are cool features in Gtalk, then upgrade to 1.0.0.95. Here is the catch, the suggested way does not work. The update it downloads is 1.0.0.92 as against the requisite 1.0.0.95. You can download it here.
Here are some Predictions
Gtalk would support PSTN calling in a later incarnation. Can it be free worldwide?
Gtalk would introduce a loyalty free version of their open source library, currently the voice transport is based on a proprietary Gips Media Engine. This media engine could be based on such open source libraries as speex, iLBC or the G7XX family.
Skype would now be under pressure to make their voice mail service a subscription free service, as a natural extension to this. This is just to retain all of those subscribers who have opted to subscribe this service.
well, you may even call the above a wish list :-)
