Google Voice to Become a Free VoIP Service Soon?

It's no secret that we're big fans of Google Voice here at Switched. But, while it's proven quite useful for archiving voicemails and text messages, we don't enjoy having to be tethered to an existing phone line in order to place and receive calls. When Google snatched up VoIP service Gizmo5 in November, though, we knew it would only be a matter of time before the company launched a full-fledged competitor to Skype, and an alternative to mobile carriers' costly voice and data combo plans. That day may be arriving soon enough, as sources within the company have reported it is currently testing a desktop Google Voice VoIP client.

The application is in the "dogfooding" phase, a testing technique by which Google requires its employees to use its own products. The Google Voice desktop client would allow users to place and receive calls directly from their PCs, without forwarding them to an existing mobile or landline phone. Even more exciting, a source at Google told Download Squad, "We're looking at a full, free, VOIP/SMS desktop client... It's amazing." Yep, free.

We're waiting to see if Google Talk and Google Voice will eventually be combined into a single product. Talk already offers voice and video calls, as well as the ability to send text messages, so there are a lot of overlapping features between the two. Additionally, Google Voice has been largely neglected; it has only received small updates (such as file transfers from iGoogle and Orkut), and has generally lacked consistency across its various implementations (as many features included in the Gmail version are absent from the aging desktop app and iGoogle). We're constantly wishing that Google would do a better job of integrating its various products, and combining Voice and Talk just seems to make sense. [From: Download Squad and TechCrunch]