Google divides Hangouts into Chat & Meet, takes on Slack

With the release of Allo and Duo many speculated Hangouts would either stop being supported or completely disappear. This has proven not be true though. The platform is now getting a new life.

The company from Mountain View is working hard to make Hangouts more of a business focused service. They are now not only splitting it into two separate modules, Chat and Meet, but also adding a ton of new genuinely useful features.

Chat will be a platform focused on productivity and office work. It will let you easily chat in large groups and thanks to the brilliant G Suite integration (which Hangouts is now part of) it will make sharing, viewing and editing files a breeze. There is also a built-in bot which can, for example, automatically schedule meetings based on the Google Calendar schedule of all the members of a specific group.

Meet on the other hand will be a platform dedicated to video chat. The process of setting up and holding a video conference will be greatly improved when compared to what we now have on Hangouts. The performance is promised to be increased both on the computer and server side of things. The most popular browsers will also work with the service without having to install the plugin which was required for the service up until now.

Google is definitely going in the direction Slack went in with their flagship enterprise collaboration service. This is surely a great idea and gives us a better understanding of what Hangouts really is for, placing it in its own niche.

What are your thoughts on the upcoming update? Do you think Google is doing the right thing? Let us know in the comments below.

Source: The Verge, Droid Life

Kailash Sadhikar

An engineering undergrad student who loves all things tech. He has a soft spot for Android.