The feature is not a gadget like most of your iGoogle features. The chat feature comes in the form of a sidebar and resides below the left-hand navigation menu.

The chat feature is not on everyone’s page yet. It is currently showing up for a large set of Google users, but those who do not have it yet can simply go here and opt-in to get it.

Users who already use Gmail chat will find that their same settings will apply here. The most important thing to note however, is that you will not be limited to chatting only with Gmail users. You can invite friends from other services to join your list.

Google acknowledges that there are still some bugs with the feature and requests the patience of users while they work them out. "Here at Google, it’s common practice for us to involve our users as early possible so we can make sure we get it right," says Google Talk Engineer Rhett Robinson.

Of course users who do notice bugs can report them, and Google is always open to additional feedback as well. At this point the chat feature is rolling out in English for US users, but other languages and countries will soon follow. More on the chat feature here.

You can find more details in a Googletalk blog post by Jonas Lindberg and there are more details on the blog of Rich Tehrani.

What you can do is chat to the bot that does Google translations. So for example if you want to translate from English to French, you add en2fr@bot.talk.google.com as one of your contacts. Then whenever you go chat with en2fr, what ever you say will be translated from English to French in the reply from the bot. If you’re a frequent user of Gmail, as I am, you may find this a very useful feature. The translation isn’t perfect but it often will provide what you’re looking for. From French to English, you chat to fr2en@bot.talk.google.com.

At the moment the bot chats are with yourself, meaning you enter a phrase in one language and it appears in yet another. In the not-too distant future we can expect to be able to chat with anyone in our native tongue and have the content translated to our intended audience. Google’s translation bot shows us a baby step in this direction. One can imagine that soon the translation bots will sit between the two parties and allow the users to communicate in real time, each using their own language. As Duncan Riley suggests, Google Talk is getting us one step closer to the ultimate Babel Fish, as envisaged by Douglas Adams in the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Comments