Google Hangouts now offers free voice calls and MMS

The inexorable death of Google Voice is almost complete with the announcement today that Google is bringing voice calls to the Hangouts app.

The functionality is rolling out today to Android, iOS and on the web. It’s a staggered rollout on Android, so if you don’t have the Hangouts 2.3 update available yet, it should show up in the next couple days (or if you are feeling impatient you can track down the .apk pretty easily). On Android you’ll need to download the Hangouts Dialer as well.

Calls to other Hangouts users regardless of their location are naturally free and calls to phone lines in the US and Canada are free as well. If you insist on calling internationally and not just having the person on the other side install Hangouts, those rates can be found here.

MMS support is also available to all for the first time, although it’s not exactly seamless yet, with the images coming through as URLs that you have to click to view. Hopefully they clean this implementation up in the coming months, but it’s good to see it finally arrive regardless.

If you have downloaded the update and given it a shot already, we’d love to hear your experiences.

source: androidandme