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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> They have not made any changes to Google Voice or GV integration since the rollout of Hangouts.

If you have upgraded from Talk to Hangouts, outbound calling via Gmail no longer works (there is no longer even an icon for it) since the introduction of Hangouts. So that's a change (though, a reversible one, since you can switch back to the old GTalk Chat interface in Gmail.)

Google's stated that they intend to fully integrate outbound calling via Hangouts (in fact, it sounds like their intent is to replace the entire distinct Voice functionality, including the UI, by integrating Voice fully as a subfeature of Hangouts), but they haven't done it yet.

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1. If you have upgraded from Talk to Hangouts, outbound calling via Gmail no longer works (there is no longer even an icon for it) since the introduction of Hangouts. So that's a change (though, a reversible one, since you can switch back to the old GTalk Chat interface in Gmail.)

It works just fine, there simply isn't an icon for it. Use the Google Voice extension. This is noted all up and down this thread. The actual process of GV calls being handed off to Talk/Hangouts is the same it's been for years. A tiny icon went away until they flesh out the rest of GV into Hangouts (I have very bold predictions about why they took away the call button temporarily, but I'm keeping that to myself for now)

2. but they haven't done it yet.

Look, I'm willing to take back everything I said, but quite frankly, Google Voice hasn't improved since I started using it 4 years ago and I'm not holding my breath.

> It works just fine, there simply isn't an icon for it.

No, "it" (as I specifically was referring to the integration of outbound calling into the Gmail UI) doesn't work at all.

> Use the Google Voice extension.

Yes, there is another way to make browser-based outgoing GVoice calls which can be used since the Gmail UI integration is broken with Hangouts, but that doesn't make the Gmail UI integration any less broken.

> (I have very bold predictions about why they took away the call button temporarily, but I'm keeping that to myself for now)

I'm not shy about it; I figure that, given their stated intention of fully integrating Voice into Hangouts its for exactly that purpose -- as Apple does with iMessage and SMS, the plan it to integrate some kind of availability-based preferred channel determination (possibly retaining an option to manually select the communication mechanism, given that the options with Hangouts are more involved than just which channel to send text over) and are working out the UI for that.

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