14 DAY TRIAL // Google+ hangouts are becoming more interesting or at least more feature rich lately. They've just gotten Google Docs integration and now they're adding support for Google Voice as well.
What this means in practice is that you'll be able to call someone on their phone from inside a hangout.
This makes hangouts much more useful in a number of situations, since you can add people even if they're not using the site at the moment or aren't even near a computer.
"In the past few months, we’ve graduated two widely-used features from Hangouts with extras to the main Hangouts experience: screensharing and Google Docs," Google explained.
"Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re graduating a third and very popular feature -- the ability to call a phone number from Hangouts. Calls to the US and Canada are free, and international calling rates are super, super low," it announced.
The feature is relatively easy to use - you can just invite someone to join a Hangout like you'd normally would, via the Invite button. Click on the +telephone link and you'll notice a Telephone tab where you'll be able to dial in the number.
After you're done writing the number, click Add and the phone will be ringing soon. Note that you can only invite one user via phone; adding a new number will cancel any existing calls.
The feature had been in testing as a Hangouts extra. Several months ago, Google added several features to Hangouts that weren't available to all users by default. It's been graduating those features ever since making them fully-fledged features of Google+ Hangouts for everyone.
The screensharing feature, which enables users to display a live view of their entire desktop, was the first to make the cut followed by the Google Docs integration that debuted recently.