Still using Hangouts? Google Chat Beta access may be around the corner
It feels like we’ve been talking about the impending demise of Google Hangouts for the better part of a decade. In reality, been a little over two years since we officially learned that Hangouts would be scrapped and replaced with Google Chat, the evolution of Hangouts Chat (the company’s messaging service for Google Workspace users) which itself was a tweaked version of Hangouts.
Confused yet?
If you’re still using Hangouts to chat with friends, family, or co-workers through Gmail in your browser or the Hangouts app on your phone, you may soon post a message asking you to check out Google Chat for “new experience and features not found in Hangouts.”
This message, added to Google Chat in a recent update, indicated that Google will likely be rolling out a Google Chat beta that will allow certain users to test out the new service and kick the tired to make sure everything is working properly before the billion or more Hangouts users who have access to the service are ported over.
It’s not clear how the Google Chat beta would work since we’re assuming people would still be able to message friends who use Hangouts through the service. A recent update to Google Chat did enable messaging abilities between Google Workspace users and Hangouts already, so there shouldn’t be any issues there.
For a detailed explanation on what the transition from Hangouts to Google Chat will look like and what new features you’ll have access to once you’ve been migrated to the new messaging service, check out the video below.
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Source: 9to5Google