Google rolls out Gmail Phone: Now available only in the U.S.

On August 25, 2010, Google rolled out the built-in Google talk chat app, a plug-in that would enable Gmail users to make VoIP calls from the Gmail.com in-box or from within iGoogle. Currently, this feature is only available to Gmail users in the U.S.

Calls made to Canada and the U.S. will be free till January 2011 and costs of international calls would range between 2 cents and $5 per minute. On the official Gmail Blog, Robin Schriebman, a Google software engineer, wrote,

“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,”

Schriebman further said that the feature will not be available to Google Apps but Google is working on to make this feature available to the users of Google Apps as well.

Source: Gmail blog

The picture above shows how Gmail users would be able to make VoIP calls using the new “Call Phone” feature once it is added in Gmail. Gmail users can make calls just by dialing the phone number of the person they want to contact with. In order to enable this feature users are required to install Google’s voice and video plug-in (to get the plug-ins visit this link).

To further know about the call rates, use can visit the Google voice calling rates page.