We saw VoxOx at last year's CES and were impressed by their devotion to creating a portal for all your communication networks. But their interface was a bit too cluttered for our tastes (and many others, according to the VoxOx team). Even with their good intentions and wealth of features, their product just wasn't good enough to topple everyone's favorite (often open-source) communications clients. Now that just might change.

As of yesterday, VoxOx went from communication client swiss-army knife to kitchen drawer. It still does all the same stuff, but it's prettier and easier to navigate.

VoxOx, like traditional chat clients comes in two parts—a buddy list-type window and a chat window. The buddy list contains far more than buddies, and items can be grouped, merged, or searched with ease.

And that chat window allows you to bounce from chatting, to SMSing, to emailing, all to the same person, all without opening a new chat window. Received chat replies, texts, emails—even voicemail transcriptions— are then forwarded straight to that same window, seamlessly threading your conversation history. The brand new universal message window supports a handful of networks too, including Skype, Facebook chat, and AIM. If their live demonstration over the clogged CES networks was any indication, it all happens relatively fast too.

VoxOx's bag of tricks doesn't end with a sexy unified chat box and buddy list either. Our demonstrators had it translating the languages of messages received or messages sent (or both), initiating phone calls through their phone service (which offers low prices for international calls[or free if they're using VoxOx]), and even texting a number from a not-so-smart phone to initiate a call.

The new VoxOx launched yesterday and can be downloaded for free at VoxOx.com.