Pidgin 2.6.1 brings in the much awaited Voice and Video support for XMPP and are hoping to get these killer features to other protocols as well. In layman's terms, what it means is that now you can use voice chat and video chat in gmail. Install latest Pidgin 2.6.1 in Ubuntu the easy way.

This release includes major changes and improvements:

Voice and Video support - Thanks to Mike Ruprecht and his Summer of Code project from 2008, libpurple now has a voice and video framework that can be used to add these features to our protocol plugins.

Making chats and even video calls using Empathy. Empathy is a IM/voice /video client that uses Gossips's UI and Nokia's MissionControl

This document describes how to set up a Mumble voice chat environment with Fedora 7. Mumble is a low-latency voice chat software with focus on games.

Linux: Ever wanted to video chat inside gmail. Now you can

Just 3 years after Google first released their Jingle extension for Jabber which they used in their GTalk application it is finally possible to use it on the open source desktop too.

Skype 2.1 Beta vor Linux has been released yesterday, bringing a lot of new features, including:

* High Quality Video support.
* Skype's SILK audio codec.
* PulseAudio support.
* SMS sending support.
* Chat messages editing/removing support.
* Contact groups support.
* Typing notification in chat.

The developers at Collabora have extended Jingle—a multimedia chat protocol for XMPP—so that it can support audio and video conversations with more than two participants. Support for this new XMPP extension, which they call Mingle, could eventually land in Empathy, the GNOME instant messaging client.

Google Voice is all set to change the face of modern communication. This is a free service that uses VoIP calls to interconnect phone numbers. Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.