Starting today, an official Google blog post states that you can call any phone right from Gmail.
Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. “Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?’,” asks an official Google blog post.
Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.
But wait, Google is rolling out this feature to US-based Gmail users first over the next few days, so you will be ready to get started once “Call Phones” shows up in your chat list (you will need to install the voice and video plug-in if you haven’t already). If you’re not a U.S. based user—or if you’re using Google Apps for your school or business—then you won’t see it quite yet. “We’re working on making this available more broadly—so stay tuned,” states the official blog.
Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. “We worked hard to make these rates really cheap with calls to the UK, France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute,” states the post.
Reports state that Google plans to promote the new service by installing Google Voice phone booths in various airports and universities around the U.S., where people will be able to step into the booths and make free phone calls.
Google has not announced any plans to make this service available on mobile devices as yet. So Skype and other VoIP companies can breathe easy. There are dozens of other mobile VoIP apps–including Skype–inside both Apple’s App Store and the Android Market, although mobile VoIP is still a relatively new technology with performance problems from time to time.
India, anyway, is yet to made VoIP legal though numerous Indians use the technology. Indian telcos are sure to watch this development very closely.
