Call anyone from Google

By Suraj Dm

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail, says Google, at a company press conference today. 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.

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, they thought, "wouldn't it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?"

Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be freefor at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed . It's 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.
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).

They are 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 thevoice 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, visitgmail.com/call.

Posted in: Google