Hangouts Meet just got its much-needed rebrand to Google Meet amidst the surging popularity of videoconferencing tools in general. Alongside a trademark for that term, there’s another Hangouts product whose fate has yet to be decided. Hangouts Chat, the teams-focused Slack competitor from the Mountain View company, might also be getting a rebrand that does away with the troublesome Hangouts branding.

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With the launch of Gmail’s Material Theme revamp on the web in 2018, Tasks was reintroduced as a standalone to-do app. Google Tasks now appears to be readying Hangouts Chat integration.

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With the classic Hangouts transition for G Suite customers delayed until 2020, Google has more time to add functionality to Hangouts Chat and reach feature parity. The Android and iOS apps today are getting a bottom bar redesign that splits “People” and Rooms.”

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At Cloud Next 2019 in April, Google announced a slew of upcoming Gmail and Hangouts Chats features to help boost productivity. “Out of office” Calendar integration will begin rolling out to those two apps in the coming weeks.

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Google announced this morning that Hangouts Chat is coming to Gmail. That integration was teased earlier this year as one of the legacy features coming from classic Hangouts. At Cloud Next 2019, Google detailed public Guest access, Meet/Voice integration, and a Progress Web Apps to replace Electron clients.

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This October, Google is retiring Hangouts “classic” for G Suite enterprise users. Ahead of that, a number of legacy features will be added to the Hangouts Chat and Meet replacements. At Cloud Next 2019, Google announced Chat integration in Gmail, while public streaming and live captioning are coming to Hangouts Meet.

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Earlier this week, we spotted Hangouts Chat in the G Suite panel ahead of Cloud Next 2019. Before the conference next week, Google’s latest enterprise messaging app is redesigning its side panel to help users keep better track of ongoing chats.

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With the new Gmail for web last April, Google introduced a “quick-access side panel” with widgets for Calendar, Keep, and Tasks. It has since been added to other G Suite apps like Drive and Docs on the web. The next service to make an appearance in the side panel could be Hangouts Chat.

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Alongside initial details on the transition of G Suite users from classic Hangouts to Hangouts Chat & Meet, Google is also giving us just a little bit more info on the transition from ‘classic’ Hangouts to free Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet for consumers.

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After our report last year that Google plans to shut down classic Hangouts in 2020, the company announced that it was “fully committed” to supporting classic Hangouts users until it completed a “successful” migration to Hangouts Chat and Meet. The company didn’t detail a timeline for the Hangouts transition then, but now that day has come — at least for G Suite users.

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With all the buzz recently around (the recently dubbed) “Hangouts classic” shutting down, in favor of Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, we took some time as a group to give Hangouts Chat a hands-on trial. Needless to say, things didn’t go smoothly.

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Over the past week, the narrative around Google’s messaging and communication services has been defined by a spate of planned deprecations — both of which 9to5Google first reported about. While older services will be “sunset,” the company’s vision for consumers hasn’t changed much since earlier this year, revolving around RCS “Chat” and Google Duo video calling.

However, complicating this dual-service future now is the newly-revealed fact that the enterprise-focused Hangouts Chat and Meet will also be available to consumers, and that Google Voice is still an active service. This is just the latest in Google’s tangled and sometimes incoherent strategy for simply saying “Hello.”

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Over the past several days, 9to5Google reported that Google was planning to move away from “classic Hangouts” and sunset Google Allo. Amid the discussion about the company’s messaging future, Google today clarified its strategy, and published a definite blog post confirming our two reports.

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Following its IPO filing last week, Dropbox today announced a new partnership with Google Cloud to integrate G Suite with the former’s platform. Integrations range from productivity and communication services, including with the just announced Hangouts Chat. expand full story

Last March, Google revamped Hangouts for the enterprise by splitting it into separate Meet and Chat apps. The former is for video conferencing and has been available for several months now, while the latter messaging component is launching today.

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With the launch of Allo and Duo, Google telegraphed last year that Hangouts would be moving to a more enterprise focus. Today, the service is finally seeing that major revamp, with the app being split into Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. The former is a Slack-like group chat tool, while the latter improves the video conferencing experience.

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