How to Chat with your Google Contacts on Outlook.com

Outlook.com is Microsoft’s brand new email service that’s built from the ground-up, which replaces Hotmail. With this new email service, Microsoft aims to attract users by offering a super clean interface, and good features. Most important of all, Outlook.com promises to focus on user’s privacy. The latest addition to Outlook.com is the ability to chat with your Google contacts right inside Outlook.com’s interface. Once you integrate both the services, you will be able to chat with your Outlook.com, Windows Live Messenger and Skype contacts with Google (Gmail and Google Talk) users from Outlook.com’s interface. But to do this, there’s a small procedure that you need to follow, and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Connect Outlook.com with Google Contacts

To get started, go to https://profile.live.com/home/services and click on Chat with your Google contacts.

Once you click on it, you’ll need to confirm that you really want to connect your Outlook account with Google. Click on Connect.

If you aren’t signed-in to your Google account, then you’ll need to enter your login details. Next, you’ll need to give permission to Microsoft to access your Google account. Click on Allow access.

You will now get a confirmation message that you’ve connected your Google account to your Outlook.com account. Click on Done.

Next, click on the Messaging panel (as shown in below screenshot) to open chat sidebar.

If the contact is online, then you can see the contact in green color and you can start chatting with him/her.

If for instance, you have connected multiple accounts like Facebook and Google, then you can select which service you want to use to chat with. You can now chat with your Google contacts (be it Gmail or Google Talk) right inside Outlook.com, and without navigating anywhere else.

Hope you like this new feature which enables you to chat with contacts from other services, right on Outlook’s interface. If you cannot see this feature, then you’ll need to wait for some time, as the feature is slowly rolling to all users.