CNet: Google Gmail Adds Voice
Presumably based on technology Google acquired when it bought Gizmo, the new voice chat feature lets you call directly from within Gmail, with automated dialing to existing contacts.
“With Google’s rollout Wednesday to Gmail, the built-in Google Talk chat app is finally getting its own voice. Specifically, a plugin that lets you surface a dial pad so you can launch VoIP calls from the Gmail.com in-box, or from within iGoogle. The big caveat is that the service is currently being rolled out only to U.S. Gmail users.
We’ve been expecting something like this to happen since Google snapped up VoIP company Gizmo 5 last November, and there’s even been speculation that this could have been a desktop app. But no, on Tuesday we discovered the online feature in-house, on Wednesday, Google made the VoIP news official. We buckled down to review the new service as soon as we got our online update.”