Collaboration

Google Splits Hangouts into 'Chat' and 'Meet'

In a bid to move deeper into the workplace collaboration market, the search giant now has an application for team chatting and a separate one for video conferencing.

Phil Goldstein

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Phil Goldstein is a former web editor of the CDW family of tech magazines and a veteran technology journalist. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their animals: a dog named Brenna, and two cats, Grady and Princess.

Google is hoping to shake up its position in the market for workplace collaboration tools by splitting its Hangouts service into two distinct apps: Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet.

The Chat service will serve as a group chat and collaboration tool that is similar to Slack, Facebook Workplace, Microsoft Teams and others. As The Verge reports, like Microsoft, Google is "betting that deep integration with the rest of its office suite is going to be catnip for IT managers and cost-conscious CFOs."

Meanwhile, Meet is designed to be a lightweight video conferencing service that is easy to access via laptops or mobile devices.

The split is being announced just days before Microsoft makes Teams available to its Office 365 customers.