Hangouts Meet supports up to 30 users in a call, and, if you browse the web with Chrome or Firefox, doesn’t need a browser plugin. The company detailed the aforementioned Hangouts Meet, a lightweight video chat service for inter-office meetings. Hangouts Chat is only the first part of Google’s one-two enterprise punch. And it supports “app scripts” that will allow third-party partners like Asana, Box, Prosperworks, and Zendesk to roll out Hangouts’ chat bots and integrations of their own. It an intelligent bot that uses natural language processing and machine learning to automatically schedule meetings with Google Calendar. And a native viewer lets participants view photos and videos directly in conversations.Ĭhat is extensible, too. Hangouts Chat supports Google Docs and Sheets - you can assign document permissions automatically based on the users who created it. New dedicated, virtual chat rooms offer an easy way to rope in multiple users, and a powerful new search function that can filter by rooms, people, links, and file types mentioned in the course of conversation.
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It inherits Hangouts’ one-on-one chat tab, plus its native compatibility with the web, Android, and iOS. Hangouts Chat, a stand-alone new service that is separate from the existing Hangouts, looks a little like Slack in form and function, but there is no mistaking its lineage. They are the first Google messaging apps aimed exclusively at the business sector, and the search giant’s effective take on Slack, Microsoft Teams, and the other inter-office chat platforms that have begun to sprout up like wildflowers in recent months. Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat are the next generation of Hangouts. Google’s size aside, it’s difficult for any company to pay equal attention to members of a growing family.Īt Google’s Cloud Next conference in San Francisco on Thursday, though, the company paid Hangouts the attention it deserved.
That is not surprising - counting Google’s other relatively new Duo messenger, the company has six chat apps. Hangouts, Google’s multi-platform messaging app, has played second fiddle to the newer, shinier Allo messenger since the latter’s debut last September.