Google Data » Brian Hutchins

Google Voice for Newbies: Custom Greetings

Brian Hutchins — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:08:00 +0000

This week, I'd like to talk about a Google Voice feature some of you may not have heard about: custom greetings. With custom greetings, you're able to record personalized voicemail greetings that only play to a specific group of people or to an individual. This feature is completely optional, but once you use it, you may realize how helpful and fun it can be.

Instructions for creating a basic custom greeting can be found in the Google Voice Help Center, along with tips for recording custom greetings for "different groups or individuals in your contact list.".

I'll give you examples of how I'm using custom greetings, but these are just a few ideas -- perhaps you'll be able to think of other creative ways to take advantage of custom greetings.

General default: "Hi, I can't get to the phone right now, so please leave your name and a message. If you don't leave a message, I probably won't return your call. Thanks."

Friends: "I might be in, I might be out. Leave a message and you might find out!

Grandparents-who-only-speak-Chinese: "爺爺奶奶你們好。對不起我現在不能接電話。請給我留言，我等會兒給你們打回來。謝謝！"

I can also imagine custom greetings being incredibly useful if you own a business. You can have a "professional" greeting associated to your business contacts and perhaps some important business partners would even have a custom greeting that includes emergency contact information.

Now that you have a bit more insight on custom greetings, be creative and record yours today. If you encounter any issues, search first to see if another user reported it in the Google Voice Help Forum; if you don't see the issue, ask users for help in the Problem Solving section of the forum.

If there are other features you'd like to see in Google Voice, please leave your suggestion on the Google Voice Suggestions page.

Posted by Carol and Heather
Googlers

Play voicemails right from Gmail

Brian Hutchins — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:16:00 +0000

I spend a lot of time in Gmail and love how Google Voice email notifications let me see voicemails in my email inbox. I can scan the transcript quickly, and when I want to hear the voicemail, it is just a click away on my computer.

However, something always seemed a little off when I clicked "Play message" and it opened up a new browser window. Wouldn’t it be better if the voicemail just played in the email? Now that is possible in Gmail. You have to turn on the Google Voice player in the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, but after that you are good to go. When voicemails come in, click on the play button, and you can listen to the whole message, adjust volume and everything right inside the Gmail message. To read more check out the post on the Gmail blog.

We hope you like this new feature. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment in our forum.

Posted by Robert Dong,
Software Engineer

Receive and reply to SMS messages by email

Brian Hutchins — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:43:00 +0000

With Google Voice, you receive SMS messages on your phones AND in your Google Voice inbox, which means you can send SMS replies from either from your mobile phone or your computer. Today, we're going one step further by allowing you to get text messages by email. After enabling SMS-to-email forwarding, every time you receive a new SMS on your Google Voice number, we will send you an email notification. Some of the benefits of this new feature include:

Unified messaging - You can get SMS together with email and voicemail notifications, all in one place in your email inbox, where you can easily search and reply to these messages.
SMS savings - If you spend your time in front of your computer, or if you get email on your mobile phone, you can turn off SMS notification to your phone in Google Voice and receive and reply to your SMS by email, saving on SMS costs.
SMS threading - If you use Gmail, you also get the extra benefit of threading all SMS between you and one contact into one conversation, so it is easy to see the whole discussion.

This feature can be easily turned on or off from the call settings page:

As always feedback is welcomed and we hope you like this feature.

Posted by Vincent Paquet

Google Voice for Newbies: Scheduling your rings

Brian Hutchins — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:00:00 +0000

A few days ago, I decided to spend some quality time poking around the Google Voice Settings page. I'm glad I did, because I found a Voice feature I never knew existed! It's the "ring schedule" feature. I'd never thought about setting up a preset schedule for phone calls and was pleasantly surprised to find out this was actually a popular requested feature by users.

This help center article describes how to set up your ring schedule. So then the question is: why would you want to do this?

There are many possible reasons, but two examples came to my mind immediately. Say you have unreliable cell phone reception at home, and you want to be able to take your calls from your home phone on evenings and weekends. However, you don't want the home line to ring and bother your roommate during work hours when you're not there. You can do this. Or if you don't want any calls interrupting your dinner from 6pm-7:30pm every night, go ahead and set your ring schedule so calls to your Google number never ring your phones during dinner time. During those hours, callers will be able to leave you voicemail so you can catch up after you're done eating.

Whether you're new to Voice or didn't know this feature existed, give it a try! If you have questions about this or any other features, visit the Google Voice Help Forum. We also welcome stories and comments regarding interesting ways you're using Voice. Share these in the "Tips and Tricks" category of the Google Voice Help Forum.

Posted by Carol and Heather
Googlers

XMPP support on App Engine

Brian Hutchins — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:50:00 +0000

Google App Engine is a product where developers can create and host web applications on Google infrastructure. Over on the App Engine team, we've noticed that there are lots of cool chat bots for things like translation or just for fun, but up until today deploying and maintaining a chat bot was a lot of hard work. So we're happy to announce the release of an API that makes it very simple to build Talk bots on top of App Engine. Check out the App Engine blog for more details.

Posted by: Michael Davidson
Software Enginer

XMPP support on App Engine

Brian Hutchins — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:50:00 +0000

Google Voice for Newbies: Forwarding phone numbers

Brian Hutchins — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:41:00 +0000

In our last post, Heather learned how to make calls through the Google Voice homepage. Today, I want to explore why someone would link multiple phones to their Google Voice number.

After choosing your Google Voice number, you're asked to add at least one forwarding phone that will ring when people call your Google number. Heather chose to link her cell phone to her Voice number. The Getting Started Guide shows how you can sync multiple phones to your Voice number. When I read this, a question immediately popped up in my mind - why would I want to do this?

Once you link your cell phone, home phone, and perhaps your work phone, you'll be able to control which devices ring based on who is calling your Google number. You can assign certain callers to ring your cell or your work phone (or both), and can forward some calls straight to voicemail or directly to the spam folder. I can see it now: family members ring my cell and home phone. Friend who only calls when she wants to gossip? Sorry - straight to voicemail without ringing.

By linking multiple phones to your Voice number, you'll also be able to switch phones mid-conversation. For example, my sister calls my Voice number and I pick up my work phone to speak to her. I chat with her for a few minutes, and then I realize its time to go home. Instead of telling my sister I'm going to hang up and call her again on my cell phone, I simply press the * on my work phone, and my other linked phones will ring. I pick up my cell phone, hang up my work phone, and continue chatting with my sister on my cell. Seamless!

To read more about this feature and how to set up your phones, please go to the help articles Features: Switching phones during an incoming call and Signing up: Setting which phones will ring. For more cool Voice features, visit the About Google Voice page. And of course, if you encounter any issues, check out the Getting Started section of the Help Forum for solutions.

Posted by Carol and Heather
Googlers

Video chat tips

Brian Hutchins — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:14:00 +0000

Hi all, we wanted to share some thoughts, tricks and tips around our Gmail video chat feature. Our first video chat tip is around making the call window bigger on your screen. When a video chat first starts, it is in the small chat window, and you see more of your email inbox than the person you wanted to talk to.

Did you know you could use the "pop-out" arrow on the top of a chat window to make a video chat bigger? This will separate the video chat into its own window that you can resize and move around as you like.

If you want to make the video chat as large as possible and block everything else out, simply use the Full Screen button in the top left corner of the video area. This will fill up your screen and make your conversation much more immersive. Based on the feedback you've given us, we have added the ability to mute your microphone while in full screen mode. To do this, simply hit the space bar!

Feel free to reach us by linking to this blog and by using twitter. We monitor "Gmail video chat", Gmail video chat", "Google video chat", or #googlevideochat in your tweets.

Posted by Fredrik Oja,
Software Engineer

Video chat tips

Brian Hutchins — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:14:00 +0000

Calls to Canada are free again

Brian Hutchins — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:24:00 +0000

In addition to making free long distance calls within the continental US, you can now call Canada for free through Google Voice. We offered this feature in GrandCentral previously, and in an effort to provide as many useful features as we can for free, we're happy to bring those free calls to Canada to Google Voice users as well.

You can initiate calls from your inbox online, from our new mobile apps, or by dialing your own Google Voice number from one of your phones and selecting option 2 to place a call.

Please note that Google Voice is only available in the US, and you'll need a working US phone to setup a Google Voice account.

Posted by Brian Peterson
Software Engineer

Google Voice for Newbies: Why am I calling myself?

Brian Hutchins — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:22:00 +0000

In our last post, Carol and I signed up for our Google Voice numbers, and read the Google Voice Getting Started Guide for information. Today, I'd like to share my first experience with the Google Voice website and the "Click to call" feature. After setting up my forwarding phones, I noticed the green arrow Call button at the top left of the homepage. Intuitively, I typed Carol's number into the "Call" box, but I was a bit confused when asked to choose a "phone to ring." I selected the existing option (which was my cell) and clicked Connect.

I wasn't expecting my cell phone to ring, but when it did, I picked up the call. After a few seconds of wondering, "Hold on, why am I calling myself?", Carol answered the line. I explained I was calling from my new Google Voice number, so she saved my new number in her address book. (If you use Gmail, you'll notice that your address book is shared across these products. This means you'll see all your Gmail contacts in Google Voice and any changes to your Google Voice contacts will be reflected in your other Google products.)

After hanging up, I realized I could choose which phone (cell, home, or desk) I wanted to use to connect to Carol. Pretty cool! Google Voice acts like a hub; you decide which phone you want to use each time you place a call, or you can check the "Remember my choice"** box to use the same phone anytime you place an outbound call from the web. When you click connect, Google Voice will ring that phone and dial out to your desired recipient. When I use the click to call feature, my Google number displays on the outbound caller ID. Now that I've done this a few times, it's not so surprising when my own phone rings when I place a call via the website.

A quick read on the different calling options for Google Voice can be found in the Google Voice Help article Google Voice Basics: Making Calls. And you can always post any other questions you may have in the Getting Started category of the Google Voice Help Forum.

Posted by Heather and Carol
Googlers

** The "Remember my choice" feature can be a bit confusing. After experimenting with it, I learned that the number selected is remembered by machine. For example, on my work laptop, I can choose my work phone as "Phone to ring", and select "Remember my choice". This means from now on, when I want to dial out via my work laptop, my work number will be selected to ring by default. If I go home and use my home desktop to dial out, I can select my home number as "Phone to ring", and select "Remember my choice". From now on, my home phone will ring when I dial out of my home desktop, and my work phone will ring if I dial out of my work laptop.

Google Voice for Newbies: Introduction

Brian Hutchins — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:20:00 +0000

Hi there! Heather and I work at Google, but are new to Google Voice. Over the next couple months, we'll be exploring this service and sharing our experiences on the Google Voice blog. We hope that by seeing the service through the eyes of a new user, our initial reactions will help us identify areas that might need more explanation, and provide this feedback to the Voice team. We'd also like to highlight some of Google Voice's features and share ideas on how to get the most out of this service.

Today, we signed up for our Google Voice phone numbers. Signing up and choosing a number is pretty straightforward. I love chocolate, so I tried to integrate that into my number. I was initially excited with my vaguely food-related number, but thinking it over a bit more, I probably won't be so proud of it when I'm 70. Scratch that. When I'm 35. Heather likes to surf, so she's pretty happy with her aquatic themed number. Keep in mind that once you pick your number, you won't be able to change it (unless you pay a $10 fee). Just like the Grail Knight said to Indiana Jones, choose wisely!

After Heather and I registered our numbers, we stopped... What do we do next? After a quick poke around, we found our answers in the Google Voice Getting Started Guide, which takes you step by step into the world of Voice.

We'll conclude this post with our recommendation to check out the Google Voice Getting Started Guide; also, consider checking out the Getting Started category in the Google Voice Help Forum. These sites really helped us find our voice (pun intended!).

Posted by Carol and Heather
Googlers

Google Voice invites for military service members

Brian Hutchins — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:23:00 +0000

It is hard enough to keep in touch with family and friends, but imagine being half-way around the world in a place like Iraq with limited access to telephones…or having to move and change your phone number every couple years. The military lifestyle often presents unique communication challenges that Google Voice can make easier, so we are giving priority invites (sent within a day) to active military and reserves with .mil email addresses at: www.google.com/militaryinvite.

For more details, see our post on the Official Google blog. If you don’t have a .mil email address, you can still make an invite request on our site.

Posted by Brian Hutchins
Google Voice Product Marketing Manager

Show off your Google Number

Brian Hutchins — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:25:00 +0000

Want to share your new Google number with family, friends and co-workers? To help spread the word (or should we say, the number), get your Google number printed on cards that you can hand out. There are three design options to choose from, so you can decide whether you want to show business info, personal info, or just your name and number.

We are giving away 50,000 free sets of 25 cards (no shipping or any other fees) over the next week. Keep an eye open for an image and link to appear in your Google Voice inbox, on the left side below the account balance, as it will appear at different times for different Google Voice users throughout the week. Once you click on the link, you will be able to customize and order your free cards through iPrint.com.

Posted by Brian Hutchins,
Google Voice Product Marketing Manager

Introducing the Google Voice mobile app

Brian Hutchins — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:08:00 +0000

Thanks to some great work by the Google Mobile team, we now have a Google Voice mobile app for Blackberry and Android-powered phones. The mobile application makes using Google Voice with your cell phone simpler by letting you place calls and send SMS messages directly from your Google Voice number. You can call from your phone's address book or enter in numbers directly, and your outbound calls will display your Google Voice number as the caller ID. You can also listen to your voicemail and read transcriptions of your messages. Check out the video below and read more on the Official Google Blog. To get a free Google Voice mobile app for your phone, go to m.google.com/voice

Posted by Craig Walker
Google Voice Group Product Manager

Attention Nerds! A new gadgets API for communication

Brian Hutchins — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:35:00 +0000

I spent my youth writing games on a computer hooked up to my parents' television but despite saving my pennies to buy a 300-baud modem, I was never able to realize my dream of writing a game that my best friend and I could play against each other on two computers. In all my games the I,J,K and M keys were used by player 1 while player 2 was stuck with W,A,S and Z on the same keyboard.

This was in the back of my mind when I started putting my 20% time towards building a simple javascript library on top of our Google Talk web client. After some demos, my 20% project grew to an 80% project, and we're now ready to show off -- and get feedback on -- the gadgets.realtime set of APIs. These APIs will let Google gadgets hosted in different user's browsers communicate with each other. The first API, gadgets.sharedstate, is available on the new Talk Developer Sandbox. With this API, you can share an object between instances of a gadget, and be notified in realtime when the other instance modifies it. More APIs and UI improvements to allow gadgets.realtime gadgets to be used on orkut and iGoogle are in the works and coming soon.

For more information and for sample applications, see the documentation.

We've set up a discussion group to collect feedback. So, help me out, fellow geeks! Try out this API and let me know what you think and share any cool gadgets you write.

Moishe Lettvin, Software Engineer

Update (4/12/10): Our team decided to stop working on the gadgets.sharedstate API. The sandbox and the test harness will be shut down soon. Thanks for giving it a try.

Attention Nerds! A new gadgets API for communication

Brian Hutchins — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:35:00 +0000

Update (4/12/10): Our team decided to stop working on the gadgets.sharedstate API. The sandbox and the test harness will be shut down soon. Thanks for giving it a try.

Show your Talk buddies where you are

Brian Hutchins — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:04:00 +0000

Google Latitude is a service that allows you to see where your friends are on a map in real time. You can choose whether to share your location with any or all of your friends and can display what you are up to with a status messages. And now there is a new feature that makes it easy to automatically share your location with your Google Talk buddies. Read more on the Google Apps blog.

Brian Hutchins
Product Marketing Manager

Show your Talk buddies where you are

Brian Hutchins — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:04:00 +0000

All Orkut users can chat

Brian Hutchins — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:39:00 +0000

Hi Orkut users! For those of you who didn't have Gmail enabled for your account or use a gmail.com user name, you may have found it odd that Google Talk was not available in Orkut for you. Well, now we are enabling chat for all Orkut accounts, without the Gmail requirement. Any Orkut user will be able to chat on the Google Talk network using their existing email address as their user name! We are in the process of turning it on for everybody, so if you don't see it yet then it's coming soon.

For added security, we require a simple email verification to use this new feature. Click here to learn how to verify your account.

Those of you who have been paying closer attention might have noticed that chat for non-Gmail accounts already works in the new version of iGoogle (available for some users, coming soon to everyone). The Talk server team has been working behind the scenes to make this possible. We've engineered a solution that allows you to chat using an email address that is not hosted at Google, while preserving our existing interoperability with 3rd party XMPP clients and server-to-server communication with other XMPP networks.

Talk in Gmail is great, and we are really excited about putting Talk in other fun and useful places. If you already have a Google account, you're all set.

Adam Fass,
Software Engineer

Chat on iGoogle

Brian Hutchins — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:45:00 +0000

You can now chat right from iGoogle, Google’s personalizable homepage, while checking news, watching videos, or playing games. iGoogle chat works from your browser, like Gmail chat, and you can exchange instant messages with any of your contacts that have an iGoogle, Gmail, or Google Talk account. To read more about iGoogle chat, check out this post on the Official Google blog.

Posted by Rhett Robinson, Google Talk Engineer

Moving to Google Voice!

Brian Hutchins — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 06:17:00 +0000

GrandCentral users,

We are happy to announce that we have made a number of improvements to GrandCentral and are relaunching the service as Google Voice. GrandCentral users have the first opportunity to start using Google Voice, which is a private beta.

In addition to the GrandCentral features you already know (one number, screening, ListenIn, etc.), we've added voicemail transcription, SMS support, conference calling, GOOG-411 integration, low cost international calling, and more. We have also integrated GrandCentral with your Google account and your Google address book.

Over the next few days, instructions will appear in your inbox on how to upgrade your GrandCentral account to Google Voice. You can also learn more about the new features in these short videos.

A few more details on the new stuff:

1. Transcriptions: Now, in addition to being able to listen to your voicemail messages, you can choose to have your new voicemails automatically transcribed. You'll see these transcriptions in your inbox and will be able to search for voicemails. Transcriptions are also included in email and SMS notifications. They are fully automated, so they aren't perfect, but we'll be working to improve this in the future.

2. SMS support: When somebody sends an SMS to your Google Voice number, that SMS will be relayed to each of your forwarding cell phones and stored in your inbox. You can reply from your computer or from any of your mobile phones and the conversation will be saved in your inbox. You'll be able to read through the conversation thread and search for past messages.

3. Conference calling: If you want to talk to more than one person at once, just tell everyone to call you on your Google number. When you get a call waiting notification, you will have the option to press 5 to add them to your existing call.

There's more for you to discover about Google Voice, so sign into GrandCentral to upgrade and check it out!

Posted by Craig Walker, Vincent Paquet, and Wesley Chan, Google Voice Product Managers

Voice and video chat now in Gmail

Brian Hutchins — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:30:00 +0000

We are happy to announce the release of voice and video chat in Gmail. Now you can chat in high quality audio and video with your Google Talk contacts from Gmail. Check out the details on the Gmail blog and the Official Google blog.

Serge Lachapelle
Product Manager, Stockholm

New Google Talk Help Forum

Brian Hutchins — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:37:00 +0000

Got a burning question about how to best use Google Talk? Today we launched a new Forum within Google Help that allows you to ask questions about Google Talk and have them answered by both Google employees and other Google Talk fans. We believe this new platform will make it even easier for you to find help, and for Google employees and fans to share their knowledge of the product.

Particularly great answers can be marked as a "Best Answer", so people with a similar problem can find a solution quickly and easily. The Google Help Forum also keeps track of how active a user is in the Forum. For example, you can see who is a Google Employee, top contributor, seasoned poster, or new poster.

And don't worry, we aren't removing the ability to search and read our old Google Talk Help Group content, but we have closed it from any additional posts. So, if you do have a question regarding Google Talk, go ahead and ask it!

Dana Jermanis
Google Help Team

New transliteration bots make it easy to chat in Indian languages

Brian Hutchins — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:52:00 +0000

Have you ever wished that you could chat with your family and friends in your native language? Sometimes there's just no substitute for expressing a thought in your own language. Google Talk now has transliteration bots that will convert text from English to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil or Telugu. Think of a bot as an invited guest to your chat session that will transliterate what you type in English to the right local script. For those who are not familiar with transliteration, it is a service provided by Google India that allows you to type in Indian languages using phonetically equivalent English script (it is also available on our labs page, orkut scraps and blogger). If you're chatting in Hindi, when you type 'haal kaisa hai janab ka?' the en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com bot will reply in Hindi as 'हाल कैसा है जनाब का?'

There are currently 5 transliteration bots - Hindi (en2hi.translit), Kannada (en2kn.translit), Malayalam (en2ml.translit), Tamil (en2ta.translit) and Telugu (en2te.translit), and remember that their names end with "@bot.talk.google.com". To use one of these bots follow these three steps:

1) First add the bot that you want to your friend's list. (For example, add en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com for Hindi). You just need to do this once.
2) Start a chat session with your friend
3) Convert the chat session to a group chat and invite the bot to it.

Read this to know more about the bots, and let us know what you think.

तो शुरू हो जाइए...

Kuntal Loya
Software Engineer

Chat on your iPhone

Brian Hutchins — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:02:00 +0000

Attention iPhone owners! You can now chat with all your Google Talk buddies while on the go. Our new version of Google Talk is designed specifically for the iPhone and runs in the iPhone's browser, so you don't need to download or install anything. Just visit http://www.google.com/talk on your iPhone, sign in, and start chatting. And because it is built for the browser, it will work on today's iPhones as well as on tomorrow's 3G iPhones.

If your businesses, school or organization uses Google Apps, you can instant message using your Google Apps account on your iPhone. From your iPhone's browser, visit http://talkgadget.google.com/a/your-domain.com/talkgadget/m, but be sure to replace 'your-domain.com' with your actual domain name.

Happy mobile chatting!

Leo Dirac,
Product Manager

Bringing the web and desktop together

Brian Hutchins — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:39:00 +0000

The philosophy for the Google Talk team is to enable real time communication where and how people need it, across different platforms, devices, and operating systems. Towards these goals, we have made Google Talk available through web interfaces like Gmail chat and the Google Talk gadget, as well as directly from the desktop through our own downloadable client and via many XMPP clients. We have faced some challenges in keeping the capabilities for each of these versions of Google Talk up to date, and we have heard your feedback on striving towards more feature parity across all versions.

While recently we have spent more time on web integration scenarios, we have also been developing a new client that allows our downloadable and web versions of Google Talk to move forward together more quickly. The Google Talk, Labs Edition release is a sneak peek into this work. Of note in this Labs Edition release is its use of the open source Webkit engine to host the Google Talk gadget. We've used Webkit to bring the Talk gadget out of your browser, and onto your desktop, able to run in the Taskbar. Google Talk, Labs Edition combines “downloadable client behavior”, like stacking notifications and displaying presence outside the browser, with nearly all of the web behaviors of the Google Talk gadget, such as emoticons, multi-user chat, tabbed conversations, etc. It can also natively display web notifications from multiple sources, such as Gmail and calendar alerts and Orkut scrap changes. A few weeks ago we added invisible mode to the Google Talk Gadget, and this functionality immediately extended to Google Talk Labs Edition.

Google Talk, Labs Edition is a first step towards a more unified experience whether you're using Talk through the web or on the desktop. Some of our savvy users may already appreciate the advantages of this approach, and we are confident that the continued improvements being made will translate into a better Google Talk experience for all our users.

Chee Chew
Engineering Director

More Translation Bots!

Brian Hutchins — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:10:00 +0000

Back in December, we released translation bots for Google Talk. While machine translation isn't 100% accurate, the idea of reducing language barriers with automated chat translations appealed to many people, and we received a lot of positive feedback. So when Google Translate recently added new languages, we decided to create chat bots for these languages.

The new bots speak Bulgarian (bg), Croatian (hr), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi), Hindi (hi), Norwegian (no), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt), Romanian (ro), Swedish (sv) and Traditional Chinese (zh-hant).

There are 26 new bots: bg2en, cs2en, da2en, en2bg, en2cs, en2da, en2fi, en2hi, en2hr, en2no, en2pl, en2pt, en2ro, en2sv, en2zh-hant, fi2en, hi2en, hr2en, no2en, pl2en, pt2en, ro2en, sv2en, zh-hant2en, zh-hant2zh, zh2zh-hant. For reference you can also check out the full list of supported language combinations. To add one of these bots to your contacts, remember to use the following format [from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com.

Toivon, että pidät siitä!

For those that don't know Finnish...

Jonas Lindberg
Software Engineer

New notifications in Google Talk, Labs Edition

Brian Hutchins — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:40:00 +0000

For me, life moves pretty fast, and with so much stuff going on it's easy to have things fall through the cracks. The other day I missed an important meeting because I forgot to open up Google Calendar after restarting my browser (don't tell my manager). Sometimes I just need a little help to stay on top of all the information that breezes by.

Our new experimental release of Google Talk helps solve this problem - it's called Google Talk, Labs Edition. It has all the features of the Google Talk gadget (but runs outside a browser), plus it adds new desktop notifications that remind you of appointments and alert you the moment messages arrive. There are notifications for Google Calendar appointments, Orkut scraps, Gmail messages, and Talk chats (of course). My favorite part? The snooze feature on Calendar notifications! Now I can put off that reminder for a few extra minutes without worrying about forgetting the meeting.

Give Google Talk, Labs Edition a try and let us know what you think!

Jonathan McPhie
Associate Product Manager

Google Talk goes green

Brian Hutchins — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:01:00 +0000

Here at Google, we're committed to helping build a clean energy future and reducing our carbon footprint. And now Google Talk is part of the solution. We don't know about you, but we were surprised to learn the inconvenient truth that every character (byte) we send in a message results in about 0.0000000000000000034 metric tons* of CO2 being released into the atmosphere! So if we can reduce the number of characters we send when we chat with all our friends, we can help the environment at the same time.

Teenagers (and some adults) must be aware of this, because they already reduce their character usage by abbreviating words and dropping vowels when they send IM and SMS (text) messages. We think this is a great idea. If all our millions of users started using IM-speak, we'd save hundreds of millions of wasted (and environmentally damaging!) characters.

For example, if we want to say:
As far as I'm concerned, you can give me the twenty dollars you owe me when I see you later.

You could save more than 50% in wasted characters by saying:
AFAIC, U can gve me the 20 $$ YOM whn I CUL8R.

In honor of Earth Day (3 weeks from today: April 22, 2008), on that day our Google Talk servers will start automatically sending your conversations using IM-speak instead of normal words. But you can help save some computing power (and more wasted energy!) by shortening your conversations yourself.

We know you'll all want to practice your IM-speak, so we're helping by introducing a new translation bot, en2im@bot.talk.google.com, which will translate your conversations into IM-speak, to help you get used to the new lingo. Add this user to your roster, or use our convenient new chatback feature to start a conversation with the bot by clicking the badge below:

You'll be doing your part to help the environment. If you get a message with an abbreviation you don't understand, send just that abbreviation to the bot and it will translate it back. And parents: as a side bonus you'll finally understand what your kids are saying! Kp on chttng, & CUL8R!

The Google Talk Team

* It takes about 2.5 Watts to power a 1Gb/s link [1]. 2.5 Joules/s / 1Gb/s = 2.5e-9 J/b * 8 b/byte = 2e-8 Joules/byte. The average emissions cost of electricity in the United States is 0.605 metric tons of CO2 per MWh [2]. 1MWh is 3.6e9 Joules. So to produce 2e-8 Joules, we emit about 3.36e-18 metric tons of CO2.

[1] C Gunaratne, K Christensen, B Nordman. Managing energy consumption costs in desktop PCs and LAN switches with proxying, split TCP connections, and scaling of link speed. Internation Journal of Network Managment, 15(5), September 2005. See slides

[2] US Department of Energy. Electric Power Annual 2006. Table ES (Divide
total CO2 emissions by total electricity generated.)