Google Testing Voice Calling In Gmail

Tootech writes "Google could be adding the ability to make phone calls from the Google Chat interface. Google is testing a Web-based service within Gmail that will allow users to place phone calls from their in-boxes. It's launched from the Google Chat window on the lower left-hand side of a Gmail page and allows users to place and receive calls from within their contacts through a user interface that strongly resembles the one used in Google Voice."

Re:Product merger perhaps?

[Superken7]

except for buzz, where everybody turned it off because it interfered with the GMail experience.

And BTW, wave.google.com has been a failure, wave as a technology and protocol still rocks.
GMail, docs and other google products are being reworked to have wave technology under the hood, and companies are starting to use the wave protocol and its technologies to deliver rich collaboration.

Re:Finally

[mark72005]

Personally, I found Google voice to be underwhelming. While the feature set is nice, as is the convenience, the sound quality is not great on the voicemail. I also had several people report that (while I was receiving some messages) they would sometimes be routed to a message that said my mailbox was not set up.

I quit and went back to using the regular carrier service, I need more reliability...

Not sure why

[jDeepbeep]

Calls would only be being placed with those in your contacts book. Your contacts would have to be poisoned first somehow, and not everyone who emails you is put into contacts unless you compose mail to them, or reply to them (ergo creating a discussion).

PS: in a literal mood, but i did recognize you were being humorous ;)

What is wrong with SIP

[Rich0]

The thing I don't get is that they don't have any support for SIP (well, there is Gizmo, which is closed to just about everybody). They're inventing fancy web-interfaces for voice calls (anybody know if they work without flash?), but they can't support SIP - a protocol specifically designed to handle these kinds of situations. Indeed, if they used SIP and you ended up calling somebody else using SIP they could save all the bandwidth by directing the phones to just talk to each other.

It seems like Google is tending to take the MS route - they don't just want to provide a service, they want to control how you can access it. Sure, some of their products are more open - maybe they just can't figure out what kind of company they want to be.

Google - please just give us a SIP interface. I don't care if you even advertise it - just bury the settings in some help page and everybody else will build the front-ends for you...

Re:Open Handset Alliance

[ceoyoyo]

Insanely cheap. And ad free. Google's free services are ad supported. If you don't want ads, you have to pay. So precedent says you'll have two choices - pay for voice calling or put up with ads when you make calls.

Re:Finally

[Guspaz]

Google Voice went public in late June.

Google Voice was originally GrandCentral, which supported Canada. Google bought out GrandCentral, and removed support for Canada as part of their transition. They kept support for one area code in Alberta, however, for reasons no-one is quite sure.