Google is turning Hangouts into a Slack competitor

With the launch of Google Allo—Google’s newest (and something like ninth) instant messaging client—Google’s older IM service, Google Hangouts, was put on notice. The company didn’t have much concrete information on what it would do with Hangouts, only offering a vague indication that it would get a reboot focused on “business.” Today, the company showed off the future of Hangouts: it’s going to be a Slack competitor.

“Hangouts Chat” is Google’s latest entry in the communication space, after the Android SMS app, Google Talk, Voice, Buzz, G+ Messenger, Hangouts, Spaces, and Allo. This one is a straight-up Slack clone, with rooms people can join and auto-completed @[username] mentions. Discussions are threaded, a feature Slack has been experimenting with recently, but in Hangouts Chat, threading seems to be much more front and center. While Slack is “optionally threaded,” Hangouts Chat is more like “threaded by default”—the main input bar is actually labeled “Create a new discussion.”

Everything is integrated into GSuite. Sharing a Google Drive file into a room will automatically manage permissions for that file, granting access to the room’s participants. Hangouts Chat supports lightweight scripting with the Google Apps script, and it supports bots from the likes of Asana, Box, Zendesk, and more. One bot from Google is “Meet,” which can scan everyone’s Google calendar and pick a time for a meeting. (Hey Google, an Allo-style Google Assistant bot would be cool.) Search is built into the interface, too, allowing users to filter by people or file type.

There’s also a new video component called “Hangouts Meet.” This looks a lot like the old Hangouts group video experience, but it’s a total under-the-hood overhaul. If your browser supports webRTC, there are no plugins required, and every meeting has a dial-in code now to allow even people on phones to join in. Google’s “Jamboard” digital whiteboards can even join the meeting, allowing anyone in the meeting to see and edit the whiteboard.

Fitting with the “enterprise” theme, it seems Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet will only be available to GSuite customers. Meet is rolling out now, and an “Early Adopter Program” exists for Hangouts Chat. There’s no word on what will happen to the regular “Google Hangouts” service, which currently exists on the majority of Android phones. While it has recently stopped becoming a default pack-in app, Hangouts (formerly Google Talk) was a pack-in app for nearly all of Android’s lifetime. As a result, it has somewhere between 1 and 5 billion downloads on the Play Store.

Both Slack and GSuite are practically prerequisites for many modern companies, and while before they perfectly complemented each other, Google is now turning Slack into a competitor. The integration with GSuite is going to be tough to overcome for Slack—companies already have to pay for GSuite, so why not dump Slack and use the built-in chat program?