Google updated on Friday its Voice extension for Chrome, allowing people to call numbers directly from the browser. If you love Google or hate retyping phone numbers, this one’s for you.
The extension adds click to call functionality to web pages. So if there is a phone number on a web page, like a Yelp page or your online address book, it will now have a hyperlink. Click it and Google will throw you a pop up window asking which phone you want to use (home, mobile, work, etc.). It then calls that phone, and puts you through to the number.
I’m always cutting and pasting phone numbers from websites into Google Voice to make calls. And I’ve asked for web based click to call from the Google Voice team for months. Now we have it, all you have to do is use Chrome.
The extension also adds a small box in the upper right of the browser. You can type in a name or phone number and call or sms it from the browser, and read recent text messages and transcribed voicemails (Google automatically transcribes voicemails, usually horribly, but it’s fun).
The extension is buggy on Macs, and you need to use the most recent Chromium build, not the launched Chrome for Mac to use it. Download one of the recent builds
here (most recent at the bottom). The extension should work fine for Windows Chrome users.
Google Voice doesn’t have an API, so third party applications need to harvest your user credentials to do anything useful with it. This Firefox add-on, for example, has nice click to call functionality but it requires that you give it your username and password. No thanks.
One last thing – it likely won’t be too long before Google is adding soft phone functionality to the browser directly via their Gizmo5 acquisition. At that point you won’t even need a phone any more. You’ll just be able to initiate and receive calls directly to your computer as you can with Skype and other services today.
Source: Gizmodo.
Related News:
Pantech Burst: Ruby Red (AT&T) 4G Phone Powered By Android
[Tutorial] How To Add Facebook Status Bar To Every Page In Google Chrome
Wrong Number On Google Voice Leads To Hilarious Conversation
[Tutorial] How To Use Google Chat From Your Desktop
Google Integrates Google Voice With Google+ To Give Users Better Interac ...
Pantech Breakout 4G Android Phone (Verizon Wireless)Recent Tech News
Google has been steadily working on its Project Glass and the prototype glasses from the project are being tested publicly by a number of Google personnel. While many have cast doubts as to whether or not these prototypes are fully functional and operate on their own, Google seems quite confident of the progress. The search giant has now unveiled the first video samples from the project.
Apple’s Siri has been lauded as one of the best voice-enabled personal assistants available. Although Siri is quite good, it is not perfect and does make mistakes. And now, Siri has a worthy contender in the form of S Voice, the voice assistant that Samsung unveiled to be a part of Samsung Galaxy S III. Galaxy S III will soon be in the hands of the consumers and S Voice will be pitted against Siri. Here’s a fairly accurate comparison of the two.
Dell has taken a great liking to Windows 8 and Dell personnel have proclaimed publicly that they may be going forward with Windows 8 tablets. While currently, Dell is not at all a success in the tablet market, it is hoping to leverage some advantage with the great interface Windows 8 has to offer. Two images have now surfaced on the web, allegedly of Windows 8 tablets from Dell.
When Facebook acquired Instagram for a whopping billion dollars, many of us kept wondering that why on Earth would the social network pay such a hefty sum for a photo sharing service. However, when Facebook later stated its ambition to be successful across the mobile platform, it was understandable since Instagram has been a huge success on the mobile devices. A recent development suggests, Facebook might have started to utilize the Instagram know-how in their (Facebook’s) products already. You will know what I mean when you see the recently launched ‘Facebook Camera’ app.
