Credit: Google
Earlier this week Google launched its Hangout Meet Video Conferencing service. This was done in an effort to attract more users towards its Hangout enterprise. Now Google has essentially divided its Hangout service into two parts by launching Hangouts Meet along with text-based messaging service Hangout Chat.
The Hangout Meet app is officially available on both App Store and Play Store. But the Hangout Chat app can only be accessed early by G Suite customers through search giant’s Early Adopter Program.
The Hangout Meet is a group video chatting service primarily launched to battle the issues faced by people during video meetings. “That’s why we’ve built Hangouts Meet to have a light, fast interface, and smart participant management,” the search giant said in its official blog post.
With the Hangout Meet the users can start a group chat by just sharing a link instead of having to go through the tedious process of making an account, installing a plugin, or downloading something else.
While the G Suite Basic and Business users can start video meetings with a maximum of 25 people, the G Suite Enterprise users can organize these meetings with a maximum 30 people. The app is tightly integrated with other G Suite apps, so the information required about any meeting can be pulled directly from the Calendar as well. “For our G Suite Enterprise customers, each meeting comes with a dedicated dial-in phone number, so team members on the road can feel connected and productive in meetings despite Wi-Fi or data issues,” Google said.
The Hangout Chat is a new service by the company aimed at being a direct competition to other services like Slack and Microsoft’s Team. It comes with threaded conversations and dedicated virtual rooms for easier conversations within a group.
“Chat’s deep integration with G Suite means shared content from Drive and Docs or photos and videos can be viewed directly in conversations. And powerful, filterable search in Chat makes it easy to find all your content dating back to the start of the project,” Google said in its post.
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