In January 2016, Google discouraged using Hangouts for SMS, recommending to instead use Google's 'Messenger' SMS app (later renamed to 'Messages'). On February 16, 2015, Google announced it would be discontinuing Google Talk and instructed users to migrate to the Hangouts app on the Chrome browser instead. įollowing reports that the new service would be known as 'Babel', the service officially launched as Hangouts during the Google I/O conference on May 15, 2013. A decision was made to scrap the existing Google Talk system and code a new messaging product through a collaboration with multiple development teams. However, its increasingly fragmented and non-unified suite of messaging offerings was also facing growing competition from services such as Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and WhatsApp. These have included the enterprise-oriented Google Talk (based on XMPP), Google+ Messenger, and the Hangouts feature of Google+, which provided chat, voice, videoconferencing features. Prior to the launch of Hangouts, Google had maintained several similar, but technologically separate messaging services and platforms across its suite of products. Subsequently, Gmail users transitioned from Hangouts to Meet and Chat during 2021 and the Hangouts service discontinued on November 1, 2022. Google began transitioning Workspace users from Hangouts to Meet and Chat in June 2020. In 2017, Google began developing two separate enterprise communication products: Google Meet and Google Chat, as a part of its Google Workspace office suite. Google then began integrating features of Google Voice, its Internet telephony product, into Hangouts, stating that Hangouts was designed to be 'the future' of Voice.

It originally was a feature of Google+, becoming a standalone product in 2013, when Google also began integrating features from Google+ Messenger and Google Talk into Hangouts. Google Hangouts was a cross-platform instant messaging service developed by Google.

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