Google today have officially taken the wraps of their latest project that has been hiding away in the depths of Google Labs for some time now.
Google Talk, a new Instant Messaging (IM) application, is the latest offering from the search engine giant which will enable you to call or send instant messages to your friends, anywhere in the world, free of charge.
We reported back in April as news leaked that Google were entering the already busy market of Instant Messaging. Google Talk is set to go head-to-head against some long standing players in the IM field, such as MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger.
Google Talk offers the usual features you'd expect in an IM client, such as sending real-time messages to your friends, emailing them when they are offline and starting a voice chat over the Internet.
Currently, Google Talk is available only for Windows 2000/XP users and only in English. Google are planning to offer more languages and support for more operating systems at a later date.
For those of you who are security conscious (or just plain paranoid), Google Talk currently does not encrypt chats or calls. Also, Google Talk will collect certain log information created in the course of a conversation, which Google state is for "internal use only, to maintain statistics on usage and to improve our service and the user experience".
Google Talk is available for download now, but as it is still in beta, it does require a Gmail username and password.