Google Hangouts Shutting Down In November, Tells Users To Shift To Chat

Google Hangouts is going away later this year, and the company is starting the migration process of its users to the Chat platform. The move was first announced in October 2020, and by November this year, Hangouts will be shut down by the search engine giant.

Google has told that users on Hangouts can download their data before November. The company says Chat has been refurnished with new tools and better integration for users.

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“We have continued to invest in Chat to help people better collaborate and express themselves, and now we are taking steps to help remaining Hangouts users move to Chat,” Ravi Kanneganti, Product Manager, Google Chat, said in a blogpost.

Those of you using Hangouts on your phone will get a pop-up screen telling them to switch to Chat in Gmail or the Chat app. It also says that for PC users with the Hangouts Chrome extension will have to move to Chat on the web or install the Chat web app.

The latest product switch makes a lot of sense in terms of the further integration that users get on Chat with other Google products. Chat will let users edit files from Docs, Slides and even Sheets thanks to the side-by-side editing feature.

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This way, people can engage in conversation with their colleagues or friends and collaborate on different files. It is easy to see that Google wants to make Chats an able competitor to other collaborative platforms like Slack, Flock, Teams and more.

In addition to this, Google is bringing more rich interface features that add further appeal to Chat for users. “Switching to Chat also makes expressing yourself more fun, whether you are using emojis with skin-tone selections, rich text editing to give your chats emphasis, @mentions to notify someone in the group or sending a GIF,” the company said.

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