Hangouts Chat Is Coming To Gmail, Rolls Out Public Streaming And Live Caption In Hangouts Meet

During its annual Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, Google announced that Hangouts Chat will be coming to Gmail. Along with the integration news, Google rolls out public streaming and live captions to Hangouts Meet.

Hangouts Chat In Gmail

Hangouts Chat in Gmail will appear in the same position as classic Hangouts. The lower left section of Gmail on web divides categories like people, rooms, and bots. This is the same setup from the recent revamp of the side panel in the web and mobile.

The rooms will be open for a full screen experience to replace the inbox or entire message. And this provides the perfect view for long and threaded conversations.

Just like the classic Hangouts, direct one-on-one messages can still open in a miniature window, but can also be expanded.

Hangouts Meet: Live Captioning & Public Streaming

Meanwhile, Hangouts Meet also has automatic live captioning in video meetings. And this is powered by Google’s speech recognition technology and available generally in English.

And because of the live captioning, this brings Hangouts Meet in line with other video servicing softwares like Skype, Stream, and Microsoft Teams which all gained text-to-speech transcripts last year.

With this, it also helps with users who hearing impaired and participants who are from countries that are non-English speaking. It also helps when a room is noisy and you have been in a business meeting.

On the other hand, live streaming on Hangouts Meet will soon be available to watchers who are outside your organization. All you have to do is create a video meeting and set it to “public”.

Google is also bumping up the number of attendees who can join a single video meeting which initially is just 100 to 250 maximum participants now. And if you are keeping count, that is the same limit of participants with Skype for Business.