How to activate and use Google Chat – The Verge

Real-time collaborative chat, as exemplified by apps such as Slack, has become a common way to communicate between colleagues and friends, especially since last year when so many of us transitioned to working from home. Google has apparently taken note of this and is pitting itself against Slack by taking two of the features from its corporate Workplace app suite Chat and Rooms and integrating them into its standard Gmail app.

Google Chat allows you to hold chat sessions with friends and groups of friends either on an informal or formal basis. The former can be done just between two people or between several in what Google calls a group conversation. The latter is done via a separate space that Google currently calls a Room.

Whats the difference? According to Google, Chat is simply a way for two or more people to chat together without any formalities for example, if you wanted to quickly talk about where you were going to meet for lunch, youd create a group conversation among your friends. Once the conversation is done, its done.

A Room, on the other hand, is for more long-term conversations. Each Room has its own name, remains available for people to leave and rejoin, will send out notifications, and can share files. Its for work projects, party planning, or any other activity where you want to keep the conversation going over the course of days, weeks, or longer.

If this sounds useful to you, then the first thing you need to do is activate Google Chat for your Gmail account. Currently, at least, you need to do it separately on your browser and on your mobile device.

On the bottom of the screen, instead of just Mail and Meet icons, youll now also have Chat and Rooms icons.

Your Gmail screen will refresh, and you will probably get a pop-up welcoming you to the new Gmail. Instead of the Meet and Hangouts boxes that used to be on the left-hand side of your Gmail screen, youll now have a Chat box, a Rooms box, and a Meet box. Any contacts with whom you previously had chats with via Hangouts will appear in the new Chat box; click on their names, and a small pop-up window in the lower left will show you those previous chats. (Note that if you blocked anyone in Hangouts previously, that blocking isnt going to carry over to Chat.)

Before we go into the specifics of how to use Google Chat, you may notice some other small differences after the refresh. To begin, the icon that looked like a quote mark at the bottom of your left column which referred to Google Hangouts will now be replaced by a couple of quote bubbles. The previous large Compose button on the upper-left corner will be replaced (why, Im not sure) by an inconveniently small pencil icon. And you now have a button on the right of the search box that lets you choose to be active, away, or undisturbed; you can also type in your own status.

People who are invited to your chat will get an email with a link, and will have the option of joining the conversation or blocking it; if they are on Hangouts or Chat, they will get a notification.

Whether youre using the web or a mobile app, to add a new message, type into the field at the bottom of the screen. A series of icons to the side or below the entry field lets you add emoji, upload a file, add a file from Google Drive, start a video meeting (essentially, starting Google Meet), and schedule an event.

A couple of notes about rooms: if youve created a room using a personal account (as opposed to a business account), anyone in the room can change its name. There are a few other rules as to the use of rooms that can be found on a Google support page; its a little confusing as to which apply just to business accounts and which to personal accounts, but hopefully Google will fix that in the near future.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that You can even have rooms within rooms. That is not an available feature, and the line has been deleted. We regret the error.

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How to activate and use Google Chat - The Verge