
Google currently offers a variety of communication applications, and understanding their differences can be challenging.
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Google also plans to make Chat available for free sometime in 2021.
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People could download it from the Google Play store, or existing Gmail users could host meetings of up to 100 participants. When COVID-19 brought many businesses home and relegated social gatherings to video conferences, Google made Meet available for free. As of April 2021, Hangouts still had not been fully removed, though Google had set instructions for businesses to make a smooth transition to Meet and Chat within their workspaces and IT teams. In 2019, Google initially announced Hangouts’ eventual replacement by Google Chat and Google Meet. Google recommends using the Chrome extension for users who previously used the Hangouts Chrome app.

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In 2016, Google Hangouts’ Chrome extension received an update for improved group chat controls. By 2019, Google no longer supported Allo. It had artificial intelligence capabilities. In 2016, Google released an SMS messenger app called Allo. Joined together, the three services became Google+ Hangouts. Google+Messenger included chat, voice, and video conferencing. In 2012, Google announced plans to merge Talk with Google+ Messenger and Hangouts, two of its other communications tools. Google Talk had competition from other companies’ communication apps, including Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and WhatsApp. It also integrated with the popular Google+. Google Talk was an enterprise-focused instant messaging application that worked within Gmail. In the mid-2000s, Google had several separate messaging platforms. History and development of Google Hangouts and Google’s other messaging apps

“Google Chat offers a modern and integrated experience in Google Workspace,” said Ravi Kanneganti, a product manager at Google Chat, in a blog post. The company says although conversations will automatically migrate from Hangouts to Chat for most people, it encourages users who want to keep a copy of their data to use Google Takeout to download their data before Hangouts is no longer available.
