Google adds phone calling to Gmail

Google's Gmail isn't just a mailbox -- it now doubles as a phone. Users of Google's Web e-mail service can now call any phone in the U.S. or Canada for free (and make international calls for almost free) from within their browser.

Google announced this feature in a blog post a few minutes ago. It seems to be built off the voice and video chat feature Google added two years ago, as it requires installing a new version of its chat plug-in, available for Windows XP or newer, Mac OS X 10.4 or newer and some versions of Linux.

(Note that this plug-in will also install a Google software-update utility in the background, which would unnerve me more if Google hadn't released that tool's code under an open-source license last year.)

I couldn't needed a couple of tries to get this plug-in to work in Apple's Safari browser on a Mac, while in the Mac, Windows and Ubuntu Linux versions of Firefox, it worked as advertised right away, allowing me to call my work voicemail, my work phone and two cellphones. The audio quality sounded fine -- as I'd hope on a Fios connection with more than enough bandwidth for voice calling.

While it's already being described as "Google Voice integrated into Gmail," the new calling feature doesn't require an account on Google's separate calling service (only opened to the public a couple of months ago). A voice account will, however, let you answer incoming calls from within Gmail.

If you have a Gmail account, give this service a try yourself and let me know in the comments how it works for you.