Google has proclaimed that the company will change its customers from Hangouts to Chat under the re-branded Google Workspace which was earlier known as G Suite in the 1st half of 2021. Google Workspace brings Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and now Chat will also be there, within a combined and an amalgamated space. Till now, Google Chat was only present for customers who had a premium subscription for G Suite. But now it is soon to become a free service within Gmail and as a separate application.
The latest Google Workspace, also, is only accessible for business customers right now. The company has recently said that it will bring it to the rest of the people by 2021. Google Chat will recollect some of the features from Hangout, like direct and group messaging, and it will abandon others. The tech giant has said that the latest messaging application will also have a similar phishing mechanism as Gmail has. It means links and attachments that are sent via Google Chat will be automatically running via real-time data from Google Safe Browsing and it will be flagged if it comes out to be malicious.
Image from Google
Google has also guaranteed that users’ Hangouts data, comprising the history of the conversation and contacts, will be automatically migrated to the latest Google Chat once it goes live in the first half of 2021. Google hasn’t given any precise date of the change, neither has specified things that the customers will have to do to make the jump.
Hangouts’ Video calls will also begin using Meet from this year’s November. And people won’t be able to call from Hangouts from the starting of 2021. Some other information is particular to Google Fi and Voice users. For users of voice, Google has said that it will begin directing messages and calls from Hangouts to the Voice application in October and eliminate Voice support from Hangouts from 2021. The users of Google Fi will not be able to handle messages and calls from Hangouts from early 2021.
The change, though, will be gradual and Hangouts as well as Chat will be obtainable for a while.
