Mountain View, California — Internet search engine giant Google has just invaded Skype’s territory Wednesday with the introduction of a new service that delivers Voice over Internet Protocol to Gmail and make phone calls over the Web to landlines or cellphones and links the service to Google Voice app. Currently, only users in the US will be able to make calls from inside their Gmail account.
Users of Google’s Gmail service have been communicating through PC microphones and speakers via a service called Google Talk since 2005. But until now Gmail consumers could not dial into landlines. The search engine giant later bundled Gmail with Voice, a Google telecommunications service that lets people use a single telephone number for all of their phones.
“Given that most of us do not spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, ‘Would not it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?'” Google Software Engineer Robin Schriebman wrote on the Official Google Blog.
“Beginning today, you can use Gmail to receive or place Google Voice calls,” another software engineer Nick Foster said in a blog post.
“We are rolling out this feature to US-based Gmail users over the next few days,” he said. A “call phones” option in Gmail chat will allow people to make, screen or field Voice calls at their computers using Gmail, according to Foster.
Foster mentioned that Google “took extensive care to make sure that our rates are as low as possible” for outbound calls from Voice numbers.
Cheap International Calls
“We have been experiment with 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 are in an area with bad reception,” Schriebman wrote.
Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free until the end of the year, Google said, and it assured calls to other countries will be charged at very low rates. Schriebman said Google worked hard to make international calling rates “really cheap.”
Calls to landline numbers in France, Argentina, Britain, Germany, China, Japan or Hong Kong cost two cents per minute, according to a Google rate chart.
Google’s Craig Walker said the product promotes “cheap easy communication”
Voice reportedly magnetized more than a million sign-ups during an invitation-only test phase before Google made the service available to anyone in the United States in late June.
“This is an important deal because now hundreds of millions of Gmail users can make phone calls right from their Gmail page,” Craig Walker, product manager for real-time communications told BBC News.
“They do not need to download any extra application or anything to begin making really high-quality low-cost calls. For the user it symbolizes much more efficient and low-cost communications.”
In addition to designating users have one phone number that rings at all of their telephones, the service converts voice mail or text messages into email and allows for toll-free calls to the United States and Canada.
In an online video illustrating Voice, Google promised “less nuisance and more awesomeness — for free.” Voice threatens to challenge global Internet telephony star Skype.
Google hopes to roll the product out to users around the world soon.
The service will shove Google into direct competition with Skype, the Internet telephone company, and with other telecommunications providers. It could also make Google a more ubiquitous part of people’s social interactions by uniting the service for phone calls with e-mail, text messages and video chats.
“It is one place where you can get in touch with the people that you care about, and how that happens from a network perspective is less important,” said Charles S. Golvin, a telecommunications analyst at Forrester Research.
Skype, which was founded in 2003, which is the most successful internet VoIP provider, lets people place calls to numbers in the United States and Canada for 2.1 cents a minute or make unlimited calls for $3 a month. Skype claims to have over 560 million registered users. The firm said 124 million used the service at least one a month while 8.1 million were paying customers.
Moreover, for $14 a month, Skype users can make unlimited calls to people in 40 countries.
Once Gmail users install a voice and video chat plug-in to their browsers, they can make a call using their computer’s microphone and speakers or a headset. Google promises that the service works “no matter what kind of phone you have or which carrier you use.”
The company plans an impressive way to get non-Gmail users to give the product a go. It is in discussion with a number of university campuses and airports to install red telephone boxes around the country to give users the chance to dial and try.
For now, Google is rolling out the feature to U.S.-based Gmail users over the next few days. Users will know they are ready to chat when they see the “Call phone” link in the chat list. Users will need to install the voice and video plug-in.
People in the United States can sign up for the service online at google.com/voice or visit gmail.com/call for information about linking it to their email accounts.