Google Officially Brings Voice To Gmail 179
siliconbits writes "Google has finally added voice support to its popular Gmail email service which means that users will soon be able to call landlines and mobiles worldwide for free or for extremely low prices. The announcement was made at a press conference in San Francisco in front of a few selected press members."
just another trip to the data mine for google (Score:0, Interesting)
no thank you.
YAY (Score:5, Interesting)
and it works in Linux with just a plugin and a browser restart
Now where's the android client?
Mobiles too? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:just another trip to the data mine for google (Score:5, Interesting)
no thank you.
I have been always wondering, why is the public (over)concerned about Google mining and their users' data, but not Yahoo, Skype, Microsoft et al?
Re:encrytion issues (Score:5, Interesting)
I can access this from Canada (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm in Canada and this feature is working through Gmail for me, though it could just be a temporary glitch. I also got into voice.google.com immediately after making the first call (it only showed call history, wouldn't let me set up a Google Voice number), but I'm locked out again now.
Re:is there a way to use this with a sip client? (Score:2, Interesting)
I dumped the traffic from a test call and I don't see any SIP.
Re:encrytion issues (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately the Google Voice part only works in the United States. You can still make phone calls out with it to Canada but no incoming calls or any of the features in Google Voice. I has a sad :(
Re:Next feature? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually that would be a very smart idea. There is still a lot of people out there who have to keep a landline for faxing. While there is services on the internet that already do faxing, you either have to charge a fee for it or put up with advertisements. Plus there is no inbound faxing on them.
It would be nice to use that Google Voice (which as of writing this is still sadly not available here in Canada) to receive faxes through your phone number and have them pop up as an email with an attachment or something. They already have the infrastructure in place with Google Voice, adding a fax service to it I don't think would be too far of a stretch.
I don't get it -- what's in it for Google? (Score:3, Interesting)
How do they make money off this?
Is someone going to be softly muttering advertisements in the background during my conversations?
Will the advertisements change to track the subject of the conversation?
Is this going to get really creepy, really quickly?
Re:encrytion issues (Score:4, Interesting)
Skype uses a closed, secret protocol. It may or may not be properly encrypted. There may or may not be intentional backdoors.
Furthermore, even if it is properly encrypted and there are no intentional backdoors, it is unlikely that the implementation is as secure against side-channel attacks as peer-reviewed software would be. In principle, no small, closed team of coders should be expected to be clever enough to catch every possible bug or weakness. Security through obscurity and all that.
(And just because the last two Slashdot threads I read on the subject had commenters who misunderstood "security through obscurity", let me just head it off now: keeping a password or key secret is not security through obscurity. "No obscurity" means keeping nothing secret except the key—that is, the algorithms, protocols, and source code are all disclosed.)
Re:To remove the annoying phone icon (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it just me, or has GMail strayed pretty far from its original purpose.
It added chat, using Google Talk's XMPP servers.
It recently added voice/video chat using Google Talk's chat protocols.
It added that Buzz feature which is a micro-blogging service like twitter. (You can have your twitter posts become buzz posts, but you cannot subscribe to non-gmail user's twitter feeds, so it is not very useful).
Now it added this talk feature, which is basically a web based VOIP system. You use the GTalk voice chat for in-network talk, this feature for PC to POTS, and optionally use a pre-established Google Voice account for POTS to PC.
Re:encrytion issues (Score:5, Interesting)
Now you need to ask yourself WHY they're giving you these things for free (and if they're going to stay free). It's not free for them.
I'd rather pay Skype the $4 a month, thanks. Not to mention Google Voice isn't even available.