Calling phone numbers in GNOME 3.2

One of my favourite feature of my N900 is the ability to very easily call a contact using my SIP account. Calling phone numbers in Empathy through SIP is possible since a while using the New Call dialog but you have to enter the number manually which can be annoying. Thanks to Folks's evolution-data-server backend, GNOME 3.2 will allow you to very easily call contacts from your address book!

First step is to mark a SIP account as being able to call phone numbers. We added an option for that in the accounts dialog.

accounts-dialog.png

Then if an IM contact is linked to an Evolution one having at least a phone field, you can call him from the contact list! Soon you should be able to call IM contacts publishing their phone numbers in their personal personal info as well.

empathy-call-phone.png

You can also call any contact using gnome-contact directly; just click on the phone icon next to the phone number.

gnome contacts

This is pretty cool because thanks to gnome-shell's contact integration it's now easier than ever to call a contact. Just search for him in the Shell overview and then start the call from gnome-contacts. That's the kind of integration we were aiming for when we started the Telepathy and Folks projects and it's great to see that we are finally getting there!

Commentaires

1. Le mardi, septembre 27 2011, 12:04 par foo

What about installing GNOME on a phone and calling using the GSM/3G modem?!?!

2. Le mardi, septembre 27 2011, 12:07 par foo

Oh, if you might want to also add support for calling over Google Talk or SkypeOut or the other Internet to PSTN gateway services.

3. Le mardi, septembre 27 2011, 13:03 par Guillaume

foo: in theory that could be possible using telepathy-ring, the Telepathy Ofono backend.

We could use Google Voice for sure, but that's not supported by Telepathy yet : https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_b...

4. Le mardi, septembre 27 2011, 14:27 par chrysn

what about other programs that provide the ability to call or send sms? i've poked a little into that in order to get gnome-phone-manager to start dialing a cellphone[1], so that might hook into here as well.

how could we have a dispatch here? most appropriate thing that comes to my mind is to have programs open tel urls[2], and to dispatch that as we dispatch a default browser.

1: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug...
2: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2806

5. Le mardi, septembre 27 2011, 14:29 par jeff

This is so very awesome. You have no idea how excited I was when I read about this in the release notes a few days ago, and integrating with the addressbook to lookup phone numbers is just icing on the cake.

Thank you so much to the telepathy+empathy folks for integrating this together!

6. Le mardi, septembre 27 2011, 20:48 par Jack

Oddly enough, I was thinking of how nice this would be just last night, as I contemplated replacing my current phone setup with a GNOME 3 tablet and headpiece (as I so rarely get calls, and tend to have a bag with me).

This will certainly lead to some intense experimentation. GNOME 3.2 is by far a phenomenal release of an already surprisingly good new version of the GNOME desktop. Be careful when you think things can't get better, because these guys will impress you.