(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 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.
Posted by Robin Schriebman, Software Engineer
Google Voice lets you manage all your phone communications and seamlessly make and receive calls on any of your existing phones. But what if you don’t have your phone with you? Or what if you’re in a place with poor cell phone reception, or you’r…
(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…
(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)
If you’ve been wanting to use voice and video chat on Linux (our top video chat request), then we have good news for you: it’s now available! Visit gmail.com/videochat to download the plugin and get started. Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon.
Posted by Tristan Schmelcher, Software Engineer
Update (5:05PM, August 9): This has now been rolled out completely.Update (4:06PM, July 23): This new feature is not yet active for 100% of calls placed with Google Voice. We plan to roll this out for all calls in the next week or so.—–At Google we…
(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)
Two weeks ago we asked you to submit photos of you video chatting with your grandma. Thank you for all your submissions! As promised, we’d like to highlight a few photos that particularly touched us.
Emmanuel from Israel submitted this photo and wrote “My grandmother lives in Nice, France and could not come to our wedding in Israel, this is as close as we got to having her with us.”
Charlie from New York City sent in these great photos of his daughter Maayan’s first video chat with her grandparents in Portland.
And Niranjan from Bangalore submitted this photo of him video chatting with his grandmother in Mumbai while away at college.
Thanks again for your submissions– and happy video chatting!
Posted by Cody Bratt, Google Chat team
(Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)
Often when I tell people that I work on Google video chat, I hear stories about how they’ve used it to give a video tour of a new home to friends, introduce a baby to relatives, keep in touch with traveling loved ones… the list goes on. This got me thinking about how convenient— and sometimes even magical — the experience of video chatting is.
So when I saw that my grandma, who loves keeping in touch with family more than anyone, wasn’t set up to use video chat, I decided to help her get started. While doing so, it occurred to me how many people there must be out there in similar situations. If only there were a simple way that any grandmother could use to get started on her own…
Introducing the Grandmother’s Guide to Video Chat:
This video, along with a printable guide, can be accessed at google.com/chat/grandma. Feel free to share this link with your grandma—or grandpa—or, well, anyone who wants to video chat to help get them up and running.
And after your grandma is all set up, take a screenshot of you video chatting with her and email it to to share it with us. The first 100 people to do so will get a t-shirt, printable guide and VHS of the video (because if your grandma’s like mine, she’s still a cassette kind of girl).
In a few weeks, we’ll feature the best photos submitted on the Gmail blog.
Posted by Jason Toff, Grandson of Evelyn & Ida
(Cross-posted from the Google Voice Blog)We’ve found that Google Voice can be useful in many different ways to many different people. But one group of people that it’s especially well-suited for is students. We’ve heard college students in parti…
If you’re like most people, you probably have different groups of friends. Now, with Google Chat in iGoogle, you can connect these friends by suggesting people they might already know, or who share their interests.
In addition, Google Chat will automatically suggest contacts we think you’ll be interested in, based on the people you email with the most (similar to what is currently done in Gmail). Suggestions will typically appear upon sign in (if available).
If you don’t want to receive contact suggestions, you can turn them off by clicking
Options, then clicking
Chat Settings, and clearing the
Display contact suggestion banners checkbox.
Posted by David Bennett, software engineer
If you’re like most people, you probably have different groups of friends. Now, with Google Chat in iGoogle, you can connect these friends by suggesting people they might already know, or who share their interests.In addition, Google Chat will automa…
Google Voice makes it easier for people to reach you by only having to call one number that rings all your phones. But sometimes you don’t want to be reached — like if you’re in a meeting or watching a movie. To help you in these situations, you…
Ah, remember the days when you’d be in the middle of leaving a voicemail and suddenly hear an unexpected beep to indicate you had run out of time for that message? Or when you’d return from vacation only to find your voicemail box was full and frie…
Using Google Voice for Android just got a whole lot faster. Until now, notifications of new messages appeared within 15 minutes of when they were sent. Today we are releasing a new feature called Inbox synchronization, which will notify your Android-po…
It’s hard to believe, but it’s a year to the day since we first launched Google Voice!One of the best things about this past year has been receiving tons of helpful feedback and ideas from our users. We wanted to thank you for letting us know what you…
Posted by Jason Cooper, orkut teamLate last week, we added API support for fetching albums and photos via apps running in the sandbox. Now your applications can request and display the viewer’s public albums, enabling you to create an even richer, pers…
