Category: Google Hangouts

A new update for G Suite paying customers is rolling out that brings a handful of improvements to the Google Vault feature.  With the update, you will be able to set a custom retention length of time for Hangouts Meet recording as well as be able to set a policy for user’s Drive trash folders.

For those who are not G Suite users or who are unfamiliar with it, Google Vault is your domain’s retention policy manager when you use the service from Google, allowing you to set how long things like emails and files are retained along with Hangouts Meet recordings and search results.

Google Hangouts has officially dropped support of SMS for non Project Fi or Google Voice users.  The support ended yesterday and was something that had been planned since Google announced the change back in March.

The change is part of the overall strategy of Google to move their G Suite customers to the new Google Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat while leveraging Android Messages for SMS on Android devices.  For consumers, the focus is on Google Allo and Duo to meet these communications needs.

Google Hangouts has an update rolling out for Android that is probably best described as a house cleaning release.  The update takes the messaging app to version 16 and cleans up contact lists and improves search within the app.  Contact lists in this update are more streamlined with the Contacts option in the menu now gone.  It has been removed from this part of the app as it was redundant to the Floating Action Button in your chat lists.  You can use that FAB to add a chat with any contact(s) so they are effectively listed there for you.

Search within Hangouts has also been improved around contacts.  Now when you tap the FAB to start a new conversation, when you start to type in the name of a contact, you will see four different lists:  Frequent, On Hangouts, Your Groups and Not on Hangouts.  The idea here is to quickly identify what communication paths are open for a contact so you can chose the best one for them.  For those who are not on Hangouts, you will see an “Invite” link by their name.

Google has announced that they have acquired Lime Audio to boost their audio performance in Chromebox for Meetings and Google Hangouts.  The acquisition, of which the financial details were not released, will allow Google to improve the audio experience as more customers are turning to video and audio conferencing in their day-to-day operations.

One of the biggest challenges to a great video meeting is the audio quality. Conference rooms today come in all shapes and sizes and that can provide a challenge for acoustics. Additionally, a poor internet connection can hamper voice quality in video conference calls. Limes Audio has been building solutions that remove the distracting noise, distortion and echoes that can affect online video and telephony meetings, improving the overall online conference experience.

Based on the release about the acquisition, Google is going to be incorporating the Lime Audio technology in to Chromebox for Meetings and Google Hangouts.  When or how this will be done was not disclosed.

Google Hangouts has been updated for Android that brings a much desired feature for those who use Hangouts a lot:  Direct Share.  For those who aren’t familiar with what I’m referring to, Direct Share allows you to share content from another app directly to someone on Hangouts.  To this point, if you wanted to share something, it was difficult and involved a fair bit of cutting and pasting in some cases.  That isn’t a big deal for those who don’t use the app much but for power users, it was a time consuming step.  That, for the most part, is gone now.

This afternoon Google began pushing out a big update to Google Hangouts, their SMS & IM app for Android.  The update brings the app to version 7 and this is one that all users will want to get and try out.  Perhaps the biggest new feature is one that many Hangouts users had requested:  The ability to do Quick Replies.

Everyone pause for a moment and soak in the glory.

Now on the Notification Shade, you can do a quick reply to a message and send it.  It saves you from having to open up the Hangouts app and makes replies, especially while you are on-the-go (but not driving… because driving and Hangouts don’t mix).  There is nothing you need to do to enable the feature.  It will be automatically started for you after you upgrade to this new version.