Google’s recent acquisition of the voice over IP company Gizmo5 has sparked speculation that Google would integrate that technology into their Google Voice services. (on a sidenote: Lifehacker has already posted a method to combine both services back in August)

The confirmation that they indeed will add voip to Google Voice came today in the form of a news article over at eWeek.

Voicemail transcription, inbox integration and threaded SMS are fantastic features, but we’re really just scratching the surface. Gizmo5 gives us talent and talent technology. They have specific tech and skills in further integrating telephony with devices and desktop and Web-based computing. We want to make sure you’re communication is available to you irrespective of where you are at, what device you have in your pocket, etc.”

What could this mean for the end user? Most likely a reduced phone bill as calls could then be made from mobile devices that are connected to a wireless network.

The major problem of those contenders is actually to convince a group of users to use it. If I liked Gizmo5 I still had to convince my contacts to make the switch as well, otherwise it would not make much sense to use it at all unless you only wanted it to make (international) phone calls. There are basically four major functions of Gizmo5: VOIP calls, Instant Messenger, File Sharing and Video Calls.

Like in Skype Voice over IP calls are free to other Gizmo5 users and cheap when you make outbound calls. A feature that is unique to Gizmo5 when compared to Skype is the Instant Messenger support. Gizmo5 supports MSN, Jabber, AIM, Yahoo and some other networks.

If you buy credits for making outbound calls you will be pleased that they do not expire if you are not using them in a certain period of time. An interesting note is that the memory footprint of Skype is almost double of Gizmo5′s which could be a reason to switch if you use low end hardware.

Gizmo5 seems like a pretty good alternative to Skype and if you have some buddies that still use Skype try to convince them to making the switch to Gizmo5 just to test it out. They might like it as much as I do and make the switch.