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Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

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11–20 of 212 posts

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#11
Maybe it's just me, but I've had this functionality on the iOS version of Hangouts for a while (I already have Google Voice). Outgoing phone calls from Hangouts show my GV number as caller ID. Incoming calls also ring on my Hangouts app. I did not know that that wasn't available for Android users...

Anyway, it's very handy. I have a US Google Voice account, but live abroad. Calls from hangouts are the primary way I talk to my friends and family back home. Wifi or a very strong 4G signal is required, 3G doesn't really cut it.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#12
It's really sad that Google took all that direction with Hangouts.

Now requesting any bug fixes for federated Google Talk is just pointless. Google completely ignores them under excuse that "Hangouts is the way now".

For example there is no hope they'll fix server to server encryption which they don't provide in Google Talk federation, which cut off all contacts from there since a lot of servers now make such encryption mandatory.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#13
post #5

Didn't this used to work fine with Google Voice and Google Chat? Then they broke it, and now it's fixed? Lately, Google Hangouts has been giving me abysmal results when talking to my parents in the US. The video freezes every minute or so, and even voice only doesn't work so well. It used to work much better.

Yes. They are re-announcing it as if it is a completely new feature.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#14
post #5

Didn't this used to work fine with Google Voice and Google Chat? Then they broke it, and now it's fixed? Lately, Google Hangouts has been giving me abysmal results when talking to my parents in the US. The video freezes every minute or so, and even voice only doesn't work so well. It used to work much better.

They are merging their different messaging services in Hangouts.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#16
post #9
post #5

Didn't this used to work fine with Google Voice and Google Chat? Then they broke it, and now it's fixed? Lately, Google Hangouts has been giving me abysmal results when talking to my parents in the US. The video freezes every minute or so, and even voice only doesn't work so well. It used to work much better.

The Google Voice app still did a traditional cellular call to my knowledge. You had to get a third party app like GrooVe IP in order to make a data call via the Google Voice system.

They had a phone system built into Gmail's web interface, which IIRC could be treated the same as any other forwarding phone in GV. So when someone called me, it'd ring on my computer and on my phone, and I could answer either of them.

I don't recall personally placing any calls from the Gmail interface, but I think the functionality existed.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#17
Fine, but I wish they'd stop breaking some of the core features in hangouts. Since fairly recently, non google users are unable to get into video hangouts via new-style (non /_/calendar/) google calendar created links. Uberconference integration doesn't consistently work. Screenshare (since the plugin was phased out) doesn't work in chromium/ubuntu, but does in firefox. I've reported all of these issues in the product forums, but haven't seen resolution on any of them.

I know google isn't "into QA", but for such a core product it's remarkably flaky.

Re: Introducing free voice calls from Hangouts

#20
This has been available on iOS for a long time, which I found to be really, really strange, given that you would think Android would be the platform where they'd want to put their more advanced features.

It isn't half bad, though -- the call quality, even when the call terminates in an actual phone number, exceeds that of cellular by a good margin, due to what I assume is a much better bitrate being used. And it works even if you don't have a Google Voice account. This is nice, because I can fire it up and make a phone call to a customer (I work for an MSP) without giving away my cell phone number. This is important to me because if all my customers had my cell number, I'd have to change it constantly or never have peace.

edit BTW, some pitfalls of this I have discovered. Depending on how well your cell handles handoffs between Wifi and LTE, your call may be dropped as you walk away from a Wifi hotspot. It works over 3G, but not well. The ringer for Hangouts on iOS is almost impossible to notice, so if you get an incoming GV call, good luck with that. I have had a good number of randomly dropped calls that I could not trace back to a cause. If you get an incoming REAL phone call on your real phone number, Hangouts (at least on iOS) immediately boots you out of your Hangouts call, even if the Hangouts call is on Wifi. (With Verizon, voice call kills LTE data stream, so this is to be expected, but with Wifi... not to be expected.)

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