The speed of Google rolling out a new product or a new version of existing product is just unimaginable. They really put up a lot of effort by keeping their promise to “Release Early, Release Often” in application development.

Yes, as the title of this post says, GMail now allows you to make phone calls over the Internet or to speak in person via video directly from your Gmail account! All you need is a computer, a broadband internet connection, a GMail account and, for video calls, a web camera.

This new feature is not enabled by default and you need to install Gmail voice and video
chat plugin developed by Google, which also means it’s not a 3rd party plugin. Just follow the following steps to activate this awesome feature and start using it :-

• 1. Go to mail.google.com/videochat and download the Gmail voice and video chat plugin (a quick 2MB download)
• 2. Be sure to restart your browser when asked, after that sign in to Gmail.
• 3. In the Chat section of your Gmail, select the contact you want to call. Click on “Video & more” in the lower-left part of the chat window.
• 4. Click either “Start voice chat” or “Start video chat“. If your contact doesn’t have a web camera, you can still have a voice call or a one-way video call.
• 5. If you’d like to make the video area full screen, just move your cursor over the video chat and click the icon in the upper-left corner.
• 6. When you’re done chatting, just click the “Hang up” button.

The system requirement for Gmail Voice & Video Chat is the following :-

• PC with Windows XP or Windows Vista, or
• Intel-Based Mac with Mac OS X v10.4 or later
• Any browsers that support the latest version of Gmail (Google Chrome, Firefox 2.0+, Internet Explorer 7.0, and Safari 3.0)
• Flash is enabled on your web browser.

Check out the introduction video.

I suppose Gmail is the first free webmail service to include video chat, so kudos to them, again!