Google shuts down Hangouts, upgrades to Google Chat | Digit

San Francisco, Nov 2 (IANS) Google has ended Google Hangouts, a text, video and voice chat app built into Gmail, and upgraded it to “Google Chat”.

On Tuesday, the Google Hangouts web app provided its last offering to the users. After that time, users were redirected to ‘Chat on the web’, according to an official report.

Also, the Google Hangouts app is no longer available on Android or iOS.

Google Chat comes with a modern, feature-rich experience that will allow users to react to messages with emojis that feature skin-tone selections, respond with smart replies, format text with rich-text editing, tag specific people withA@mentions, and search for and share GIFs.

For users, it will be easy for them to pick up their conversations from where they have left off as the conversations will migrate automatically from Hangouts to Chat.

Also, for better collaboration, it will offer to edit Docs, Slides, or Sheets with side-by-side editing to make it easier to collaborate while you continue a conversation, the report added.

It also includes “Spaces”, a dedicated place for topic-based collaboration. With this, users from one place, teams and groups can share ideas, work on documents, and manage files and tasks.

Meanwhile, back in June, Google previously said that Chat is a better way for users to connect with others.

“As we take this final step to bring remaining Hangouts users to Chat, we hope users will appreciate our continued investment in making Chat a powerful place to create and collaborate,” Ravi Kanneganti, Product Manager, Google Chat, said in a blogpost.

(Except for the headline and cover image, the rest of this IANS article is un-edited)

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