It looks like Google’s messaging situation is about to get much worse. This morning Google has unveiled their plans for Hangouts for Gsuite which involves splitting the application into two – Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.
Hangouts Meet is being positioned as a corporate application in line with Google’s vision to transition the app to a more business focused service. It’s being launched as a video meeting client aimed at making video chats easy. Google is making it easy to join a Hangouts Meet of up to 30 people from a Calendar entry, email invite or an ad-hoc share from a link; GSuite customers even get a dedicated dial-in phone number.
Hangouts Chat is more the Hangouts we’ve come to know and tolerate. Its been changed a little into more of a team friendly environment for discussion with virtual rooms which focus on easy sharing of documents from Drive including Docs, photos and videos.
The Chat application will also introduce the concept of bots for the first time, the first bot Google is showing off is @meet. According to Google @meet is ‘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’.
According to Google, Hangouts Meet is available from today though they did say that it will gradually roll out to all G Suite customers over the next few weeks. Hangouts Chat though is only accessible through the Early Adopter Program which interested G Suite customers can apply to join here.
Now Android RCS messages is my only hope for Google’s message strategy. Hope big three carriers in Australia could support it very soon.
This does not sound good for Hangout users 🙁 My understanding was that this will only be available for GSuite users, meaning everyone else will be forced on to another platform.
Google do you even phone bro???
Fail. Just have the one app not two and incorporate Allo and Dup into it