Voice call trials within Second Life and EVE Online were successfully conducted back around April of 2006. Next week, Linden Labs plans to do a small beta trial of ntegrated voice chat, and have a beta for all users by the end of March.

According to CNET, the voice chat can be done “either in group mode–in which anyone with the feature enabled will be able to hear voice conversations in their immediate proximity–personal voice chat, or group voice chat.” and “latter two options don’t require people to be near one other to have a voice conversation.”

Additionally, voicechat functionality will be free of charge to everyone during the beta and will work on any computer that can currently run Second Life. The VoIP technology is being provided by two Linden Lab partners: Vivox (Press Release) and DiamondWare.