Google Announces Free Telephone Service to Any Phone Using Gmail

If you ever wanted to ditch your landline to save money, now may be the best time ever to do that. Google announced today that users of their Gmail email service can make free voice and video calls to landlines, cell phones and other users of this service.

Many people around the world continue to pay for and keep their landline phones, even when they rarely make a call with that type of phone. After all, most people use their cell phones to make telephone calls these days.

Today, Google announced on their blog that users of their Gmail email service can now make voice and video telephone calls for free directly from inside their Gmail inbox. Even better, now the person being called does not have to be logged into their Gmail account in order to receive the call. It is still likely, of course, that the person being called will incur minutes on their cell phone plan but this is no big deal at all.

Why is this such a big deal? The Skype telephone service became incredibly popular because calls were free to others who were logged into Skype at the same time, but calls were not free if one of the parties were not logged into Skype. The new Google voice and video service does not require this and that fact should make this telephone service incredibly popular in a hurry.

According to Google's blog post, Google is offering these calls for free in the United States and Canada for the rest of the year. International calls using this feature will be billed for as little as two cents a minute.

Many people are already using Google Voice to make free calls to other users of Google Voice. For these users, their Google Voice number will be displayed as the inbound telephone number.

The Official Gmail Blog as additional information beyond the Google Blog post. This post describes how easy it is to set up. Just go to this Google chat link and start setting up the service.

Free telephone calls should definitely be free in the age of the internet. This service may not work for everyone at all times, especially for those with limited minutes on their mobile plans. But for those telecommuter employees or individuals who make many calls a day, this Google telephone service offering free voice and video chat via Gmail may be the big break they have been looking for.

The Google Call Phones from Gmail service sounds like a very big deal because it certainly is. Free telephone service is a powerful product. You will probably need to have a headset to make these calls but these can be purchased easily and for little cost. In fact, some laptops and computers already have built-in microphones and speakers so you may not need a headset after all. Check your computer.

References

Google Call Phones from Gmail, google.com/chat/voiceSkype telephone service, skype.com