Call phones 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?”

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.

Google Plans Adorable, Green, and (Most Importantly) Free Google Voice Phone Booths

When Google announced the previously rumored phone call feature for Google Voice inside Gmail, we all got excited for a Skype-challenging VoIP service that's already embedded in our email. But the most charming element of the announcement was yet to come.
Instead of a boring old ad campaign of TV commercials, YouTube videos, billboards, and what have you, Google decided to do something a little bit more fun. The company is constructing several old-style British phone booths that will be using the new Google Voice feature--all for free. The phone booths, modeled on a 1957 vintage example, will be installed in high-traffic areas, like college campuses.
The Google Voice phone booths seem to be completely free--there's no way to contribute money, for one thing--so I suspect the calls will be limited to the States and Canada. There'll also be a 20-minute limit on phone calls to discourage unscrupulous youngsters from yapping away on the phone for hours like they do in old-timey sitcoms from the '90s.
Even better, at least part of the booth is solar-powered. There's a big light inside the otherwise-spartan booth which is powered by a solar panel on the outside. It's not clear if the phone itself is powered by solar energy or not.
Google hasn't released information regarding the specific number of booths or the locations in which they'll be installed. But keep an eye open--you might see a free, adorable phone booth on a college campus near you.