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Call phones from Gmail
August 25, 2010
(Cross-posted from the
Gmail Blog
)
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?”
Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.
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 (see
comparison table
) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.
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.
We’ve been testing this feature internally and have found it to be useful in a lot of situations, ranging from making a quick call to a restaurant, to placing a call when you’re in an area with bad reception.
If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see
instructions
).
We’re rolling out this feature to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days, so you’ll 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!
For more information, visit
gmail.com/call
.
Update
Aug 26
: This has now been rolled out to everyone in the U.S. If you don't see the feature yet, try logging out of Gmail and signing back in.
Posted by Robin Schriebman, Software Engineer
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