A free version of Google Chat is officially set to arrive in the first half of 2021. As we saw earlier this month, Google is starting to migrate from Hangouts with a “preview of the new chat” to free personal accounts.
Chat has long been just a Workspace app, although paying customers can invite anyone with a Gmail address for specific conversations. The company spent the last year migrating companies from Hangouts to Chat and Meet.
Google is now ready to make Chat available to free users who still use Hangouts, so the classic service can eventually be suspended. How identified in Ars Technicaby Ron Amadeo, some users who are opening the standalone Google Chat app today are being greeted with a “Welcome to Google Chat” prompt.
Google Chat introduces a new experience and features not found in Hangouts.
As this is a preview of the new chat, you may experience bugs and other problems.
This beta allows you to reach and find any Hangouts contacts you’ve saved, although group chat is not yet available today. In terms of design, Google Chat is a direct messaging application. However, there are some business features that consumers will have access to, including the ability to quickly search and insert files from Google Drive and create meetings in Calendar.
Amadeo also points out how video calling is totally dependent on Google Meet. Thus, invitations to video calls generate a link instead of starting a call immediately. In the meantime, we also hope that Google Chat will be available in Gmail as a dedicated guide next to “Meet”.
The Google Chat preview for Hangouts users is not yet widely available today. The “welcome” prompt did not appear on several accounts that we checked today. Google’s earlier guidance said that the transition option would be available “from the first half of 2021”. Conversations, contacts and saved Hangouts history will be automatically migrated.
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