Google Chat

Hangouts Chat is an intelligent communication app for teams that takes direct messaging in Hangouts and evolves it to reflect the way modern teams talk business.
Working on a project means bringing cross-functional teams together, discussing tasks that need to get done and sharing your work. Chat is built with exactly this in mind.
Dedicated, virtual rooms create a lasting home for each project, with threaded conversations so your team’s progress is easy to follow. Chat’s deep integration with G Suite means shared content from Drive and Docs, or photos and videos can be viewed directly in conversations. And powerful, filterable search in Chat makes it easy to find all your content dating back to the start of the project.
Chat is built not only to reflect the way teams work, but to provide a platform for the enterprise tools they work with. The Hangouts Chat platform supports a wide range of capabilities — from bots to simple scripting using Google App Script — and integrates with third-party applications so teams can do more right from within the conversation. Some companies we’re teaming up with to build out the platform include: Asana, Box, Prosperworks and Zendesk. And to make workflows even easier, Chat features @meet, an intelligent bot built on top of the Hangouts platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to automatically schedule meetings for your team with Hangouts Meet and Google Calendar.

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Next year, Chat will become available as a free service—both in the integrated experience in Gmail and the Chat standalone app. Chat includes familiar Hangouts features like direct and group messaging, with helpful additions like send to inbox, faster search, emoji reactions and suggested replies. With Chat, you can more easily plan with others on goals and similar interests, share and collaborate on files, and assign tasks to help keep everyone on the same page. In addition, Chat features the same strong phishing protections we built in Gmail, so if a link is sent to you via Chat, it will be checked against real-time data from Safe Browsing and flagged if it’s found to be malicious.
Starting in the first half of 2021, everyone can begin upgrading from Hangouts to Chat. To ensure a smooth transition, we will help automatically migrate your Hangouts conversations, along with contacts and saved history. We'll share more specific guidance on what steps you can take when we begin the transition process.

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