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’re travelling internationally and don’t want to incur expensive roaming charges? Wouldn’t it be great if you could use your computer to make or receive calls?

Starting today you can use Gmail to receive or place Google Voice calls.

To get started, check the box next to Google Chat in your list of forwarding phones and the next time someone calls your Google Voice number, Gmail will notify you of an incoming call. You can take the call or even listen in as the caller leaves a message, in a single step right from your computer.



To make a call, just click the Call phone link in Gmail and enter any number or name from your address book.


All calls made from Gmail will display your Google Voice phone number as the outbound caller ID and all international calls will use your Google Voice calling credit and are offered at the same low Google Voice rates. We took great care to make sure that our rates are as low as possible. For those of you not as familiar with international calling rates, check out our comparison table.

Finally, check out this video:



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.

Update (8/26): This has now been rolled out to everyone in the U.S. If you don't see the feature yet, try logging out of Gmail and signing back in.
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Labels: Google Voice Blog

Thanks for all of your feedback on last week's Hangouts launch. We just posted an update on Google Voice and Hangouts on Google+.

(Cross posted on Gmail Blog)

With the big day right around the corner, activity in the North Pole is hitting a fever pitch.

Google Voice helps you customize how you treat callers by giving you the ability to play a custom greeting for your parents or send your chatty neighbor straight to voicemail.

Many users have asked us for controls aimed at people who are NOT in their address book.

When we asked our users what features they’d like to see in Google Voice, we heard a lot of different answers. And we listened very closely to all of them.

Since we launched Google Voice back in 2009, we’ve supported visual voicemail so you could open the Google Voice app, see all your voicemails with text transcripts, and play them on-demand.

To help make it even easier for you to organize your contacts, today we’re adding Google+ Circles to Google Voice.

Sometimes the times that we’re offline can be our most productive times. However, whether on a plane or out of range of coverage, it’d still be nice to be able to draft text messages.

(Cross-posted from the Gmail blog)

As the holiday season approaches, we're happy to announce that we've extended free domestic calls within the US and Canada for 2012. This is our way of helping you connect with friends and family across the country.

MMS has been one of the constant feature requests since we launched Google Voice and we’ve been hard at work trying to make this happen.

Today, we're happy to announce that we've made the first step in our efforts to bring this feature to our users.

As you may have noticed, the Google Voice blog looks a lot different today. That’s because we—along with a few other Google blogs—are trying out a new set of Blogger templates called Dynamic Views.

(Cross-posted from the Gmail blog)

If you're calling internationally a lot, you may have noticed that your calling credit goes a very long way... which makes it easy to get caught off guard when it runs out.

At Google, we believe that our users should be able to export any data that they create in (or import into) one of our many products, and we've created a project called Google Takeout to make this process as easy as possible.

(Cross-posted from the Gmail blog)

We understand that it’s not always easy or affordable for our troops serving overseas to call friends and family at home, so starting today we’re making it completely free for or all uniformed military personnel with valid United States Military (.mil) email addre

(Cross-posted from the Gmail blog)

We’re always trying to make it easier for people to connect—whether that means sending an email, chatting or video chatting, you can reach the people you care about from right inside Gmail. Last year, we made it possible for those of you in the U.S.

(Cross posted from the Gmail blog)

Over the years, we've expanded Gmail's communication abilities by allowing you to make voice and video calls to other computers and more recently call phones. Until now, though, you were limited to making one call at a time.

If, like me, you have more interesting ways to spend your time than talking to telemarketers, the “Report Spam” button in Google Voice is probably your best friend.

(Cross posted from the Gmail blog)

Today is Father’s Day in many countries around the world, so whether your dad lives across the street, across the country or across the ocean, it’s a good day to let him know you’re thinking about him.

Until now, if you changed your Google Voice number, ported your number to Google Voice, or opted in for the Sprint Option 1 integration (where your Sprint number becomes your Google Voice number), your previous Google Voice number remained on your account for 90 days before it was returned to Google

It’s official, the Google Voice integration with Sprint is now live!

As we mentioned when we first announced the integration, there are two ways to bring Google Voice to your Sprint mobile phone:

Option 1: Keep your Sprint number: Your Sprint number becomes your Google Voice number so that when pe

For the third installment of Google Voice user stories, we heard from Grant Barrett, the co-host of A Way with Words, a radio show about words and language.

Ever wake up after a long night and see you called a bunch of exes but don't remember what you said? We're sure you haven't, but, well, we've heard it happens. Quite a bit.

Over time, we've worked to bring an integrated Google Voice experience to your mobile device by building mobile apps, introducing Google Voice Lite, and most recently Number Porting.

Since our first birthday, we’ve been working hard to bring new features to Google Voice and make it available to as many users in as many places and on as many devices as possible.

As we mark this milestone, we want to thank all of our users in the Google Voice community.

(Cross-posted from the Gmail blog)

With the ability to call phones built right into Gmail, you no longer have to get out your phone and retype a number anytime someone sends you one in an email or chat message.

For the second installment of Google Voice user stories, we chatted with Amy Seidenwurm, one of the co-founders of Backwards Beekepers, to find out how they are using Google Voice to rescue swarms of bees.

1. Tell us about your organization.

We’re often inspired by the creative and interesting ways that individuals and organizations use Google Voice, so we thought it was time to start sharing some of their stories.

Roses are so 2010. Whether you see your special someone every day or you’re in a long distance relationship, Google Voice gives you a bunch of one-of-a-kind ways to let your sweetheart know that you’re thinking about them on Valentine’s Day.

867-5309 could be one of the most iconic phone numbers of all time, but it’s not the only number that a lot of us remember by heart. Many of us have a phone number that we've shared with family, friends, and contacts over the years and are reluctant to let go.

My boyfriend and I traveled from San Francisco to NYC to visit my family for Christmas and meet my newborn niece for the first time. About an hour after takeoff, he started frantically checking his pockets, jacket and bags, only to discover that he had left his driver’s license at the airport.

(Cross posted from the Gmail blog)

When we launched calling in Gmail back in August, we wanted it to be easy and affordable, so we made calls to the U.S. and Canada free for the rest of 2010.

Since we launched Google Voice for iPhone a few weeks ago, we’ve been hard at work to add a few improvements that didn’t make it into the first release.

At the top of the list was adding support for iPod Touch and iPad.

With two grown children, my mom decided that one perk of empty nesting (in addition to a lack of teenage angst and a lot less laundry) was canceling our complicated family cell phone plan. When she signed up for a new plan, she also mistakenly signed up for a new phone number.

Growing up, December was always a favorite month of mine. School would let out for two weeks, snowflakes would start falling and I’d write my letter to Santa to remind him that I’d been especially good that year (and ask if he’d mind bringing me a few Ninja Turtles).

Keeping in touch with family during the holiday season can be challenging for anyone, but it’s especially difficult for military families with loved ones serving around the country or overseas.

Gmail’s built in video chat and free calls to the U.S.

Google Apps recently launched an improvement that made dozens of exciting Google services available to Google Apps users for the first time. As part of this launch, Google Voice is now available to our Google Apps users for free with their Apps accounts.

Earlier this year we launched a Google Voice HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today we’re taking the Google Voice experience on the iPhone to a whole new level with the launch of the official Google Voice for iPhone app.

One of the great parts of working on the Google Voice team is that we get to hear about all the interesting, productive, and fun ways you take advantage of Google Voice.

Heading off to college usually means packing up the car and saying goodbye to your family and friends, so the Google Voice team put together a bunch of ways to make it cheaper and easier to stay in touch while you’re on campus.

Mobile is all about getting super fast access to what you’re looking for and Google Voice is no exception. So, today we’re releasing an update to the Android app, which gives you immediate access to your Google Voice Inbox and settings via two new home screen widgets.

Google Voice lets you take charge of your telephony experience, giving you one number that rings all your phones.

Last week, we launched Google Voice in Gmail to let you make calls right from your computer.

Google Voice lets you manage all your phone communications and seamlessly make and receive calls on any of your existing phones.

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.

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At Google we are obsessed with speed.

If you’ve called your Google number to listen to your voicemail over the last couple days, you may have noticed that things sounded a bit different. The new voice that’s greeting you is Kiki Baessell, a fellow Googler with a friendly voice who helped us record new automatic voice messages.

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S.

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