Skip to main content

Hangouts Chat, Google’s Slack competitor, is now available for all G Suite users

Slack is one of the best-known and most widely used collaborative services around, and as such it’s been inviting increased competition. Some of the bigger players have been making moves recently to compete more directly with Slack; Microsoft Teams for example, looks like it will soon offer a similar subscription-free tool. Google hasn’t ignored Slack either, creating Hangouts Chat as a competitor, and now that tool is generally available.

Hangouts Chat shouldn’t be confused with the older version of Hangouts, which was Google’s chat service until it was deprecated in favor of Google Allo for messaging and Google Duo for video calling. Unlike Hangouts, Hangouts Chat focuses on providing a variety of collaborative tools to help groups work together, such as creating dedicate group workspaces, scheduling meetings, and managing tasks. Of course, it also provides the basic messaging functions that Hangouts provided for individuals.

Recommended Videos

The tool has been in public preview mode since March 2017, and now it’s rolling out to all users as a core G Suite service. Hangouts Chat is integrated closely with other G Suite apps, including Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and users can use Google’s search function to find any and all information located within the system. Google has also integrated artificial intelligence into the system to make it easier to book conference rooms, search for files, and more.

In addition, there’s also a Hangouts Chat application programming interface (API) that lets developers create add-ins and connections to other services. Chat comes with 25 built-in bots that provide a variety of functionality, including @Drive to alert you to files that are shared with you or accessed by colleagues, and @Meet that helps schedule meetings. Third-party Chat integrations include Xero for accounting, Dialpad, RingCentral, Uberconference, and Vonage for communications, and Lucidchart and Zoom.ai for productivity.

If you’re still using the old Hangouts, then Google assures you that your chats and contacts aren’t being left behind. Hangouts Chat is compatible with the classic version and can access your Hangouts contacts. Hangouts Chat also works with Hangouts Meet, the video collaboration tool that Google introduced directly to the public in early 2017.

Mark Coppock
Mark Coppock is a Freelance Writer at Digital Trends covering primarily laptop and other computing technologies. He has…
ChatGPT prototypes its next strike against Google Search: browsers
ChatGPT on a laptop

ChatGPT developer OpenAI may be one step closer to creating a third-party search tool that integrates the chatbot into other websites as primary feature. If the project comes to fruition, OpenAI could target Google as both a search engine and web browser.

A source told The Information the project is a search tool called NLWeb, Natural Language Web, and that it is currently in a prototype phase. OpenAI has showcased the prototype to several potential partners in travel, retail, real estate, and food industries, with Conde Nast, Redfin, Eventbrite, and Priceline being named by brand. The tool would enable ChatGPT search features onto the websites of these brands' products and services.

Read more
ChatGPT monthly usage may now rival Google Chrome
A person sits in front of a laptop. On the laptop screen is the home page for OpenAI's ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot.

A number of popular generative AI platforms are seeing consistent growth as users are figuring out how they want to use the tools -- and ChatGPT is at the top of the list with the most visits, at 3.7 billion worldwide. So many people are visiting the AI chatbot, and its figures are rivaling browser market share. It can only be compared to Google Chrome figures in terms of monthly users, which is estimated to be around 3.45 billion.

Statistics from Similarweb indicate that ChatGPT saw a 17.2% month-over-month (MoM) growth and a 115.9% year-over-year (YoY) traffic growth. Some highlights that spurned the ChatGPT growth during 2024 include its parent company, OpenAI, updating its web address from a subdomain, chat.openai.com, to a main domain, chatgpt.com. The tool especially saw a surge of traffic in May 2024, when it hit a 2.2-billion-visit milestone, and has been growing ever since, according to Similarweb researcher David F. Carr.

Read more
ChatGPT Search is here to battle both Google and Perplexity
The ChatGPT Search icon on the prompt window

ChatGPT is receiving its second new search feature of the week, the company announced on Thursday. Dubbed ChatGPT Search, this tool will deliver real-time data from the internet in response to your chat prompts.

ChatGPT Search appears to be both OpenAI's answer to Perplexity and a shot across Google's bow.

Read more