Thursday, August 26, 2010

Gmail Phone Call Feature: How to use Gmail to make free calls?

Gmail Phone Call Feature: How to use Gmail to make free calls?

Google has officially revealed a new feature that allows you to Use Gmail to call landline phones or mobile phones using Gmail Phone Call Feature. Read ahead to know how to use gmail to make free calls to any mobile phone.

Until now, Gmail voice and video chat helps people to stay in touch with friends and family using computer’s microphone and speakers but this required to sign into Gmail at the same time. Now, Google has officially unveiled a new feature with which users can call directly on landline phones or mobile phones from Gmail. This new service was announced at a press conference on 25th August, Wednesday morning, basically to let users to put voice calls through Gmail to phones anywhere in the world.

Using Gmail, calls to both landline and mobile phone within the U.S. and Canada is free for at least the rest of the year. In other parts of the world, Google charges a small fee to dial numbers depending on the region and whether it’s a landline or a cell phone. Also, they tried hard to make calling rates really cheap with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan and many more countries for as little as $0.02 per minute.

As per the suggestion of synergy, those users with Google Voice can take benefit of Google voice features within the Gmail context, for example the ability to record phone calls, listen to users leaving a voice mail and then join a call, or have incoming calls “ring” both a separate phone as well as the browser.

Requirements to use the calling service of Gmail:

    * A Gmail account.
    * Also, you will require have installed and activated the voice and video plug-in, if you haven’t already done so.

Even after all this necessities if you don’t see this “call phone” line near chat, it may be because Google has not yet enabled your Gmail account for this service.


    * First of all, open your Gmail account and go to “Chat” option on the left side of your Gmail screen. The tab contains a green phone symbol that says “Call phone”.


    * Just click on “Call phone” tab at the top of your chat list. A box will appear telling you about the service that US/Canada calls are free in 2010, and that emergency calls cannot be made via Google Voice.


    * After reading the box, click on “Accept”, meaning that you’re accepting that you understand and agree to Google’s terms of use.
    * Then, look for the call box on the page and enter either a phone number or the name of a contact by using the dial pad. Just use the delete button of your keyboard if you make a mistake while entering a number on the dial pad.


    * To start call dialing, press the blue “Call” button at the base of the dial box. Finally, you have a conversation from your computer with someone on their phone, wherever in world.

This feature may found 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. Users having a Google Voice phone number can see their number as the outbound caller ID while calling from Gmail.

This feature is rolled out to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days and for non US-based user, Google is working on a rollout solution in owing time, so stay patient!

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