CyberNotes: How to do Conference Calls with Google Talk

This article was written on April 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Tutorial Thursday

Google Talk is by far my favorite instant messenger to use, but for some reason I never quite understood why they restrict you from starting a conference call. This is a feature I’m sure a lot of people would appreciate, and being able to talk to multiple people simultaneously would be a great addition to the software.

In the meantime however, there is a hack that you can use to do conference calls. It isn’t exactly the prettiest thing in the world because you’re going to have several instances of Google Talk running simultaneously. Here’s how it is done:

  1. Find the shortcut that you use to open Google Talk, then right-click on it and go to Properties.
    Google Talk Conference
  2. At the end of the shortcut add /nomutex which is what will let you run multiple instances of the Google Talk Client.
    Google Talk Conference
  3. Now you need to open one Google Talk for each person you want to chat with. That means if you want to have a voice conversation with two other people you will need to run two instances of the client:
    Google Talk Conference
  4. Now just open up a conversation window for all of your friends that you want to talk with at the same time and start chatting.
    Google Talk Conference

Pretty much the only bad thing about doing this is that everyone will have to do the same thing…so if there are a total of 3 people in the conversation (including yourself) then each person will need to have two instances of Google Talk open.

This is good for more than just conference calling though, this also means that you can sign-in to multiple Google accounts simultaneously. That might be useful if you have a separate account for work and a separate personal account because you can use both simultaneously.

If conference calling is really an important feature that you think Google Talk should have available, then let them know over at the Gmail suggestions page.

Source: IPAhome

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