Gmail May Offer Free VoIP Calling with Google VoiceGoogle's been really quiet with its future plans for its Google Voice service, which remains invite-only at the moment, but it looks like full internet telephone calling through Gmail is in the cards. The super-dedicated Google Operating System blog gets an anonymous tip and screenshot showing a Gmail chat window with all the tools you'd need to call over Google Voice included: dialpad, contact picker, credit tally, and call button. The TechCrunch and Download Squad blogs had Google sources telling them in April that a Google Voice desktop client was under internal testing, so it's not too far-fetched to believe Google would also slide voice calling into Gmail. At the moment, Google Voice can still make free VoIP calls with Gizmo5, but accounts for that Google-purchased service have been suspended.

A Google OS blog that obsessively follows all the leads it gets recently received an anonymous tip that Google was testing Google Voice integration into Gmail. The tip was accompanied by a screenshot of a dial pad pop-up box akin to the chat box that we all know and love.

Whether or not the tip is from a real source in the know or if the screen shot is just a photoshop mockup, it's pretty much a given that Google is testing this functionality somewhere in their sprawling technopolis.

Back in April, Google was rumored to be testing a desktop application for Google Voice. According to Tech Crunch, Google was dogfooding the integration of Gizmo5 and creating a desktop application for their Google Voice project.

Additionally, in February Google's Enterprise President Dave Girouard explained in an interview with eWeek that Google has been building on its business app suite and will launch an enterprise version of Google Voice later this year. Since Google's apps are mainly cloud based, I could see this Google Voice/Gmail integration being the final product they hope to launch--rather than the desktop.

By Mike Dolan.