Google Hangouts Gets Google Voice Integration And Free VoIP Calls

sfcrazy writes Google will integrate Voice and Hangouts with the launch of its redesigned Hangouts apps for Android and iOS, as well as on the web. Amit Fulay, Product Manager at Google says, "Starting today you can make voice calls from Hangouts on Android, iOS and the web. It's free to call other Hangouts users, it's free to call numbers in the U.S. and Canada, and the international rates are really low. So keeping in touch is easier and more affordable than ever."

Comments

Hangouts is, in turn, part of plus, right?

[i kan reed]

So... doesn't that mean that yet another useful google service is trying to be shoved into their one size fits all social network people have repeatedly and widely rejected?

Re:Hangouts is, in turn, part of plus, right?

[WilliamGeorge]

Not on the app side, so far as I can tell (and yes, I use the Hangouts app on my Android phone). I've not yet downloaded this new version, but have been looking forward to it for a while since I had been using Google Voice for voicemail and text messaging, but had to use Hangouts for texts with pictures attached or group texting. Hopefully this brings it all into one app :)

Re:Hangouts is, in turn, part of plus, right?

[Ichijo]

This is actually quite useful if you're on WiFi or have more data than minutes remaining on your plan. I'm on T-Mobile's $30/month unlimited data + 100 minutes talk plan, so if Google's VoIP works as well as Skype, I'll be making most of my calls from Hangouts.

Re:Hangouts is, in turn, part of plus, right?

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Assuming G.729-level of compression, or ~8kb/second, 100 minutes of voice calls would consume ~48kb of your data plan bandwidth. Next to nothing, really.

Re:Hangouts is, in turn, part of plus, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming G.729-level of compression, or ~8kb/second, 100 minutes of voice calls would consume ~48kb of your data plan bandwidth. Next to nothing, really.

100*60*8=48,000kb

Re:Hangouts is, in turn, part of plus, right?

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Pardon me, you are correct. I meant mb, not kb.

Re:Hangouts is, in turn, part of plus, right?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

In short, Hangouts will not use your call minutes. It does use data, so may eat up your data plan if you're not on Wifi. It's a fairly efficient protocol, so you may not notice the hit to your data cap.

Wow, even "in short" is too long....

Longer explanation:

Google Voice and Hangouts are two separate things stuck together, with a little bit of GooglePlus paste. It makes things a bit confusing, since they both do "voice and text communication".

Google Voice was a purchased product, Grand Central. Grand Central grew up before smartphones and the cell plans back then were very different than we know today. As such, it's very phone number centric, and there are features to optimize costs based on rules that are no longer current, so the features make less sense today.

Think Grand Central/Google Voice as "product for geeks to do cool things for dumbphones" It did for phones what every programmer wants to do always; it created an abstraction layer, or in English, a virtual manipulable phone number. For incoming calls, that meant: trying any of possible multiple "real" phones to find you, call screening, and voicemail. For outgoing calls, it allowed calls from any of your "real" phones to look like it came from your virtual (this was clunky, oy!) and also helped with long distance - you called a "local" number and typically got better rates than from your phone company. Also, when you made a call, you were calling "cell" numbers out, back when carriers price differentiated on that. Or you could have outgoing calls look originate by a call to YOUR phone, from your virtual number. This helped when you could get the "5 friends I talk to for free" or whatever plans. All of this kind of clunky and confusing. I juggled all this, because it was worth it for me to have a personal virtual number mapped to my work phone, and then had only one device to carry.

For Google Voice, to make an outbound call on a smartphone, you'd go into the Google Voice app, tell it to call some number. Google Voice would contact Google servers, and (depending on settings) Google would call you and make the outbound call, or you would dial out (to yet another virtual number, hosted at Google). THIS IS WHERE THE VOICE MINUTES YOU READ ABOUT CAME FROM. All these calls used cell minutes, either inbound or outbound.

Now, Hangouts was invented as a Skype competitor. To really compete, it needed to be your messaging app. SMS? Sure, lets bake that in, and tightly integrate with both SMS and Google Plus, two very different beasts. What could possibly go wrong? Skype out? Well, we can do that. Lets have data only, VoIP dialing to POTS lines, and lets use the Google Voice number.

So, now my phone has a Google Voice app and a Google Hangouts app. Both can make calls out, in different ways, looking like the same number. Both can make SMS out. Google Voice has SMS as data out, but incoming can come in as "true" SMS as well. How can that be confusing? Oh, and Incoming SMS for "classic" Google Voice came from a "virtual Google phone number" not from your friend, so you could text back to the virtual number and they'd get from your Google Voice number. But.. incoming calls always came from their real number, unless you configured it to come from *your* virtual number... As I write this out I marvel at how I kept this in my head straight for so long. My Phone Book is littered with "GVoice" entries, the virtual numbers that every contact you get an SMS from or dial out to gets mapped by Google. Confused yet?

So, Google Voice still does the normal phone line juggle, so uses cell minutes (this is what you asked about). Google Hangouts uses VoIP, probably using WebRTC. It's a new protocol, and last time i checked, most VoIP apps (including Asterisk) haven't been able to connect with it. On iOS/iPhone, outgoing calls on Hangouts are VoIP only, no audio minutes. Incoming calls are through normal cell service. And all of this can change without notice. Confused? :)

Deprecating the telephone system

[MobyDisk]

Many Slashdotters have been saying for years that voice is just another protocol that can run on top of IP. The schism between "phone service" and "data service" is artificial at this point. The only feature it brings right now is that it is standardized. I wonder how long before nobody uses it anymore? I fear a world where I have to install 10 different apps to talk to people. But at the same time, if we can choose some standard protocol then we can get rid of the telephone system entirely.

Re:Deprecating the telephone system

[ArcadeMan]

What's funny is that Apple is pushing for it so gradually that the carriers still haven't realized what's happening. The sooner they wake up and realize we only need data (and a lot more of it), the better.

Re:Deprecating the telephone system

[Opportunist]

Haven't realized? Are you kidding?

They fully realized it. But they'd be first admitting to eating babies alive before they'd willingly talk about that. And they'll fight tooth and nail against anything that could come close to merging "phone" and "data". The reason is very simple: Phone IS already data to them. But data they can sell very, very, VERY expensively.

Ponder for a moment how much data a voice call is. Realize just how well it can be compressed.
Ponder for a moment how much you pay per minute for cell plans.
Now take a wild guess how expensive a kb of that data is for you.

Multiply by a few thousand and you come close to the real value of "voice data" to your carrier.

Re:Deprecating the telephone system

[ArcadeMan]

Yes of course voice is considerably more profitable to them. But if they were really fighting against the merging of the two, we wouldn't have FaceTime/Audio over 3G/LTE/etc, voice over LTE, etc.

That's what I mean by "haven't realized what's happening". They're collaborating with what's going to be the end of their insane profits.

Then again, knowing them, it's the price of data that will just up to compensate. But how many people will keep paying then? When will those carriers realize that lowering their prices will mean more profits because a lot more people will happily sign up for their services? At this point, cellphones plans are so high that only the upper-middle-class and up can pay for them without caring.

Re:Deprecating the telephone system

[Archfeld]

The 'old' land line phone system was required by regulation/law to be able to handle 75% of the projected load in the event of an emergency. The cell phone networks have NO such limits and routinely fail under a 50% load. Imagine when there are NO LAND LINES and something bad happens in a region...poof no communication at all. If we depend on the corporations to determine that load limit it will be oversold 2 or 3 times to 'maximize' profit and be totally unreliable in the event of an emergency...ie no life-line to 911 or fire/medical

Re:Deprecating the telephone system

[rasmusbr]

They're probably hoping that we will finally start using video conversations. And we sort of are.

Once video is the norm they can go on to push for 4k video, then perhaps stereoscopic 4k. This is sure to keep the data flowing and your data plan costs growing or at least remaining stagnant.

The funny part is that video conversations were technically possible in the 1970's, but it didn't catch on for whatever reason. It only really caught on about 5 years ago. I can't think of a consumer product that has taken longer to gain traction.

Re:Deprecating the telephone system

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I fear a world where I have to install 10 different apps to talk to people.

On my wife's phone, she has ways to talk to her folks (international)
Skype Video Call
Skype Audio Call
Skype Messaging
iMessage
FaceTime Video
FaceTime Audio
Line Message
Line Video Call
Line Audio Call

That's just the free stuff - not counting SMS or normal phone calls, which have tariffs. And of course we could download WhatsApp, and all the other guys.

Re:Deprecating the telephone system

[pspahn]

I can't think of a consumer product that has taken longer to gain traction.

Arby's has been around since the 60's and I still have yet to meet someone who has eaten there.

About time

[thsths]

In Google Voice it was free to call US numbers, but only while you were in the US. From abroad, you still had to pay for US calls. Google Voice had a lot of potential, but it never quite realised it. I hope this works better .

What I would like to know if there is some "call in" feature, too? Maybe not a phone number, but a way to call and then be connected to Google Hangouts.

Re:About time

[boilednut]

What I would like to know if there is some "call in" feature, too? Maybe not a phone number, but a way to call and then be connected to Google Hangouts.

Yes, as detailed at Hangouts 2.3 Update Brings Remaining Google Voice Integration ..., you can configure the updated Hangouts app to ring for incoming calls to your Google Voice number.

magicJack alternative?

[ArcadeMan]

It's free to call other Hangouts users, it's free to call numbers in the U.S. and Canada.

Wait, you mean you can call from iOS, over Wi-Fi, to a real phone number? And it finally works in Canada too?

Good-bye magicJack and the others.

edit: oh wait, that Google service will work fine for 18 months and then Google will remove it because, hey, no profits in it.

Re:magicJack alternative?

[realmolo]

They don't profit directly, but having a database of Google accounts tied to phone numbers that those accounts called/received calls from is pretty valuable, if you are selling advertising. Which, of course, is Google's real business.

You have to remember that EVERYTHING Google does is about gathering information on people, to build a picture of what kind of products those people might buy, and showing advertisements to those people. EVERYTHING.

Re:magicJack alternative?

[dontbemad]

edit: oh wait, that Google service will work fine for 18 months and then Google will remove it because, hey, no profits in it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Introduced in 2009. Since then, it has received carrier integration with Sprint, has been integrated into Google Talk, and now into Hangouts. I hardly think this service is going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

Re:This is new?

[mrchaotica]

What's new is that the voice call feature only worked for iOS, not Android until now. Since they restricted the API, those of us who use Android devices have had to subscribe to a third-party VoIP service as a bridge.

This is great for those with poor signal, too!

[Jahava]

I have T-Mobile and I am generally pretty pleased, but one thorn in my side is that where I live the signal is poor-to-none. This isn't usually a problem, as I don't generally voice chat and have other call options (e.g., Google Voice, Hangouts). However, it is definitely inconvenient to have to bootstrap every call through a laptop.

This affords me the mobility to easily make calls, wander around, enjoy my deck, etc. and removes that thorn from my side. Thanks, Google!

PS: For those who are waiting for a new Hangouts version, that's not how this is distributed. FTFA, you have to install an add-on dialer app to Hangouts and instant feature! Works great in my limited test runs.

Re:This is new?

[mrchaotica]

How? By itself, it doesn't do VoIP.