New Google Chat seems ‘inspired’ from Slack, Teams, Discord and ChatGPT

Google has announced a major redesign for its chat app, Google Chat, formerly known as Hangouts. The new chat features render a more modern look and feel to the app. Google has also added a number of new productivity tools, including feature that lets you quick start an audio or video call with a group of people, a way to create large groups of up to 500,000 participants and more.

The new Google Chat is also being integrated with other Google Workspace apps, such as Gmail and Calendar. This will make it easier for users to stay organised and productive. The new Google Chat is available now for all Google Workspace users.

The redesign of Google Chat is a clear sign that the company is taking aim at Slack, the leading enterprise chat app. In fact, the new Google Chat is similar to Slack, Teams, and ChatGPT in a number of ways. Just like Slack and Teams, it allows user to send messages in real-time. Google has also added some useful AI tool to the app to help improve its productivity.
“To help customers make the most of Google’s industry leading AI, today we’re announcing an enhanced Chat experience with powerful new features, including Duet AI in Google Chat. Chat is not only great at the basics, now with AI built-in, it’s ready for the future,” Google announced in a blog post.

Google has updated colour palette, typography, and visual styling based in Google’s Material 3 design language in the Chat. It has also brought direct messages and spaces together in a unified conversation list along with new shortcuts like chronological home view, @mentions, and starred conversations. Starting next year, the home view will have intelligent prioritisation of your messages based on your communication patterns.

Spaces will now support up to 500,000 members and Google is also enabling message views to provide a snapshot of engagement in a given space.

Google has added new tool called Duet AI is a new AI assistant that can help you with tasks like content checking, searching for file in Gmail and Drive, and summarising documents.

Huddles to Chat is another major tool. It lets one quickly join audio and videoconversations. With huddles, instead of jumping out of the conversation into a meeting, the meeting integrates seamlessly into the Chat experience. It will be available in customer preview by the end of the year.