Have you ever wondered why Google Voice wasn’t integrated into another Google service like Gmail so you can make calls right on your computer? Well, pretty soon you’ll be able to do just that as Google integrates its voice service with its e-mail service for VoIP goodness. Right now, if you’re a Google Voice user, you’re limited to just using a phone to make and take calls. You can either make those calls with your phone, or hop onto the computer and dial from there, but it still calls your phone in order to complete the call you want to make.
Once this takes effect, Gmail might start feeling a whole lot more like Skype. After all, you can chat with friends over GTalk and you can even initiate video calls with them, too. Throw in a little VoIP action and you can pretty much communicate with your friends however you want. The only the left to do is to actually, oh I don’t know, meet with your friends in person and have real, face-to-face talks and interaction.
Like GTalk, however, it’s very likely that this VoIP service won’t stay limited to the Gmail client. There has been word that once this application goes live and public, there may be desktop clients and other tools to support the new service.
I’m pretty happy to see more features like this being brought about by Google — mostly because it’s free — because there have been times where I’ve wanted to call a friend who was out of range of cellular service, but couldn’t video chat because of the lack of a camera on his or her computer. Then again, there was always voice calls over Skype (who wants to bring its sweet video calling services over to the new iPhone), which also does instant messaging, voice calls and video calls.