Search engine giant Google has announced today on Wednesday that its Gmail service will add a option which will allow users to call any phone directly from their gmail browser.
Hindustan Times reports Google will roll out the new feature to US-based Gmail users over the next few days and is working on making it available globally, Xinhua reported.
"Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail," Robin Schriebman, a software engineer at Google, wrote on the company's blog. "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," Schriebman wrote.
Users can call any phone in the US and Canada for free for at least the rest of the year, while Google also promised cheap international calls.
Calls to Britain, France, Germany, China, Japan and many other countries will be billed as low as two cents per minute, Google said.
Gmail already has a voice and video chat that allows users to talk to each other.
According to NDTV.com Google has begun testing a Gmail-integrated VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) client that would allow users to make phone calls directly from the browser.
The feature is different from the voice and video chat that is already available from Gmail using the chat feature, in that it isn't solely between chat users. Instead, the new feature looks to allow users to call any type of phone directly from their Web browser.
For those users seeing the test of the new product, the ability to make phone calls is added directly to the Google Talk popup that appears in the lower right corner of the Gmail screen, offering a keypad, a call history, and a credit balance. According to the screenshots from CNET, Google will offer free calls within the U.S. and Canada, with cheap international calling, in 2010.
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