Is google chat the same as hangouts

The stock SMS app is dead on Android. Long live SMS in Google Hangouts (free)! This chat app was born when Google Hangouts consumed Google Talk, and now it's gobbled up SMS and Google Voice as well. Hangouts has the potential to be the best messaging app on any platform, but it turns out merging four distinct messaging systems together can be a little, well, messy. It will take some effort on your part to make this powerful messenger work for you.Getting Started The new features of Hangouts require at least Android 4.0 and an update to the Hangouts app. If you want to get access to Google Voice, you also have to download the Hangouts Dialer. Irritatingly, this second app doesn't do anything on its own and just takes up space in your apps screen. Also, Hangouts never presented me with the option to sign up for Google Voice, only to incorporate it from an existing account. Signing up a new account appears to be handled separately.Friends, Messages, and Calls Once you agree to use Hangouts for SMS and Google Voice calls and messages, the app presents three bright-green columns, one each for your friends, your text-based messages, and a dialer pad to make calls. Any calls you place through the dialer, either to contacts or numbers you dial, are placed using your Google Voice number. Google Voice calls to any number within the U.S. are free, and international calls cost just pennies per minute.If you don't have Google Voice, no problem; Google Hangouts supports voice calls all on its own with the same restrictions as Google Voice. The only difference between a voice call through Hangouts or Google Voice is that Hangouts voice calls appear to come from "No Caller ID" on most phones. During my testing, one voice call through Hangouts (not handled by Google Voice) was received as several separate calls—one call for each ring of the phone. Odd.The people you contact the most appear at the top of the list in Hangouts, and the rest follow below. A search box makes finding someone a bit easier. If one of your contacts is currently active on a Google Service that shows Hangouts—such as Gmail or Google+—you see a green chat bubble next to his or her name. This layout feels much more familiar than the older version's SMS-like approach. It reminds me a lot of old-style instant messaging.Your messages appear in the center column—all your messages. Whether it's text sent through Hangouts, IMs from users on other chat services, SMS messages to your phone, or text messages sent to your Google Voice number, it appears here. If your contacts list is in good order, your messages are merged into threads by user. So, my stepmother can text me from her phone, then continue chatting over the chat function in Gmail, and I'll see it all in a single thread. Unfortunately, you can no longer swipe to archive message these threads, however.When it comes to answering my

Google has a multi-stage plan to shut down classic Hangouts and move enterprise Workspace customers to Chat. This latest step in advancing Google Chat adoption takes place next month.For the past year, your Workspace administrator has been able to keep both classic Hangouts and Google Chat available for end users that they manage. Google is now moving companies on the “Chat and classic Hangouts” setting to one called “Chat preferred.”This will see Google Chat replace classic Hangouts as the default chat application for a Workspace domain. The migration will start on August 16 and take two weeks for all users to see. At this point, the setting to maintain both services will be removed. If there are affected users in your domain, you will receive an email notification that contains more information and any necessary action that needs to be taken.However, the ability to opt out and keep both apps working remains. Similarly, there are no changes to domains that have already selected “Chat only,” “Chat preferred,” or “Classic Only.” This is “phase 4” in Google’s plan to retire classic Hangouts for Workspace accounts. This opt-out is the penultimate step before the “mandatory upgrade” in late 2021. At that point, as Google reiterated today, “classic Hangouts will no longer be supported and all remaining users will be migrated to Google Chat.”It’s important to note that Google has not detailed when classic Hangouts will stop working for free accounts. Google Chat is now available for all Gmail users, but classic Hangouts remains, though there’s work under way to deprecate it.More about Hangouts:Google Hangouts app set to warn that it’s ‘going away soon’Classic Hangouts shutdown starts as Google Voice and Fi integrations stop workingGoogle widely rolling out Chat ‘early preview’ to replace classic Hangouts Add 9to5Google to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

I would suggest you set it up this way. Once you check that box, all your SMS messages will go through Google Hangouts rather than thru Google Voice. If you have chat disabled, you need to go to Settings – Chat and turn the chat back on. Once you have it setup with a number, go to Gmail and click on your name in the chat window that on the left hand side. Make sure you sign up using the same email address you use for your Gmail account. To set it up, you first have to make sure you have a Google Voice account. Google Voice will let you send text messages directly from the Google Voice service once you sign up for a number, but you can also integrate Google Voice into Google Hangouts so that you can send SMS messages where you use Google Hangouts, i.e. The other service I use for sending SMS messages from my computer is Google Voice and Google Hangouts. T-mobile – – Mobile – – PCS – Cellular – Google Voice via Google Hangouts Here are all the ones I could find online:The format is basically the nine digit number whatever domain the carrier has chosen. You can send an email to this special email address and that phone number will receive a text message.Send Emails to Phone NumbersĪnother feature that most carriers have that a lot of people don’t know about is an email address that is associated to your phone

And to Google Chat. See a companion article to this one, What Google Workspace admins need to know about the Hangouts to Chat transition, for more details about these Admin options. This administrative setting affects whether you can access Hangouts or Google Chat within Gmail on the web. It can also enable or prevent access to either app entirely. Google has worked to make communications between people who use Hangouts and people who use Google Chat as smooth as possible. For most chats, you can freely switch back and forth between Hangouts and Google Chat. There are also many fundamental distinctions and differences between how the two chat apps operate. A line from “Ghostbusters” offers excellent advice for people during the Hangouts to Google Chat transition: “Don’t cross the streams.” If at all possible, make the switch from Hangouts to Google Chat as a group, in coordination with the team of people you collaborate and communicate with closely. Decide on a day, install Google Chat and start to use that as your primary app. Unless your administrator turns off access, keep Hangouts installed or bookmarked and adjust notification settings as desired. If you do end up having to “cross the streams,” meaning you and the people you communicate with are using a mix of Hangouts and Google Chat across platforms and/or organizations, expect occasional oddities, omissions and gaps. Google has provided a long list of details on a help page, for detail-oriented people who want to know exactly what will

Hangouts tricks?Change who can contact you. Did you know that you can decide which one can contact you directly by messaging on Hangouts. Send messages to your circles. As you may know Hangout is integrated with Google+. Snooze notifications. Disable on-screen notifications. Set up the home screen widget. Making use of chat commands. Use Hangouts as default SMS client. How do you enable Hangouts?To enable Hangouts in Gmail, click on your profile photo from the Google Talk chat list, then select Try the new Hangouts. Hangouts will immediately replace Talk, then walk you through a very brief introduction to Hangouts. How do you chat in Hangouts?Following from the article Google+ Chat Hangouts, you can “Start a video Hangout” by clicking on the video icon at the bottom of the Hangouts section. However, the preferred method is to go to the Left side drop down Menu that says “Home” and click on the drop down arrow. Then click on “Hangouts”. How do I remove contact from Hangouts?In order to remove a person from your Hangouts contacts list: Open Hangouts within Gmail. Hover over the contact’s name. Click the 3 dot menu. Select “Hide contact’s name”.

Google Hangouts(Image credit: Ara Wagoner / Android Central)Following the kerfuffle around the "shutdown" of Hangouts late last year, Google now has a hard-set timeline for the transition from the old "classic" Hangouts (which we all know) to the new Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet products. At least, for those who use Hangouts in an enterprise capacity using Google's paid G Suite service. Here's the breakdown:Google finally has a timeline for moving G Suite customers over to Chat — consumers can expect at least another year.On April 16, 2019, Google Vault (the enterprise data storage service) will stop protecting classic Hangouts messages in accordance with current Mail retention rules — data retention will be unified under one policy with classic Hangouts and Chat. G Suite administrators will then be able to manage both classic Hangouts and Chat with a single control panel, and will have the option to forcibly disable classic Hangouts for their domain.From April to September 2019, Google will start to transition features from classing Hangouts over to Chat. According to this blog post, the goal is to bring classic Hangouts features over to Chat fully before the sunset of classic Hangouts in October. Google doesn't yet have a hard date for the full shutdown fo classic Hangouts, but says that it will "start" in the month of October. The hope is that administrators will have started to transition their companies to Chat well before.If you read all of that at a quick pace, you may be worried that your personal Hangouts are somehow affected by this. You'd be wrong. It's important to reiterate that all of this information is being provided through the lens of informing G Suite administrators, not the general public. People for some reason keep looking at these G Suite announcements as consumer-facing timelines, even though Google makes things abundantly clear:The above dates are specific to G Suite customers and their end users who use classic Hangouts. We will continue to support consumer use of classic Hangouts, and expect to transition consumers to free Chat and Meet following the transition of G Suite customers. A