Announcing the launch of an enhanced Google Chat | Google Workspace Blog (2024)

Editorial note: Duet AI for Google Workspace is now Gemini for Google Workspace.Learn more.

Since we introducedDuet AI in Google Workspace, thousands of companies and more than a million trusted testers have used it to help them write, visualize, accelerate workflows, have richer meetings, and more. To help customers make the most of Google’s industry leading AI, today we’re announcing an enhanced Chat experience with powerful new features, including Duet AI in Google Chat. Chat is not only great at the basics, now with AI built-in, it’s ready for the future.

Modern messaging, powered by AI

With Duet AI in Chat as a real-time collaboration partner, you can get updates, insights, and proactive suggestions across your Google Workspace apps. We plan for Duet AI to answer complex queries by searching across your messages and files in Gmail and Drive, summarize documents shared in a space, and provide a recap of missed conversations.

We’re also delivering a streamlined user experience to Chat, withupdated color palette, typography, and visual styling based in Google’s Material 3 design language. To help you find the right conversation, we’re bringing direct messages and spaces together in a unified conversation list. In addition, helpful new shortcuts, including a chronological home view, @mentions, and starred conversations will make it easier to stay on top of the flow of communication. Early next year, the home view will become smarter and more dynamic, with intelligent prioritization of your messages based on your communication patterns.

We’re bringing the power of smart canvas to Chat, with smart chips for quick file sharing right from the compose bar, and we’re continuing to make improvements to in-line threading that will enable you to access all relevant conversation threads within shortcuts.

To help you find the right message, file, or space, we’re also updating search in Chat, with a redesigned results page and enhanced features, including suggested queries, autocomplete, “did-you-mean” suggestions, and AI-based relevance ranking of results. And to help you sound polished and professional, even when you’re on the go, we’re also adding autocorrect to our suite of AI-powered composition features.

What teams need for collaboration

Chat is built for collaboration, and now it's getting better than ever for teams of all sizes. Earlier this year, we raised the membership limit of spaces from 8,000 to 50,000. Today, we’re announcing a 10X increase to this limit. Spaces will support up to 500,000 members,so even the largest organizations can host their entire workforce in a single space (in private preview by end of the year). We’re also enabling message views to provide a snapshot of engagement in a given space.

We’re adding huddles to Chat as a new way for teams to communicate in real time using quick-to-join audio and video conversations. With huddles, instead of jumping out of the conversation into a meeting, the meeting integrates directly and smoothly into the Chat experience. Huddles will be available in customer preview by the end of the year.

Modern collaboration is more than just messaging. It’s also about bringing the Workspace and third-party apps your teams rely on directly into your conversations. We’re rolling out ways to make apps more useful than ever in Chat, including:

• a dedicated section for apps in the conversation list
• an updated Google Drive app that lets you respond to comments and sharing requests
• third-party apps for Google Chat including Workday, Loom, Zoho, and LumApps, which join our already deep bench of supported apps, including Asana, Salesforce, Zendesk, PagerDuty, and Jira
• the ability to create no-code, custom apps right in Chat, thanks to Duet AI in AppSheet

Finally, for organizations that require support for multiple collaboration tools, we’re working with external partner Mio to provide message interoperability with other major platforms, available in public preview starting today.

Help enable safer collaboration

Because Chat is integrated into the Workspace ecosystem, users benefit from the built-in protections that keep more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching Gmail inboxes and the context-aware zero trust security that keeps Workspace data secure. In addition, Chat provides real-time data loss prevention warnings to prevent inadvertent sharing of confidential data, and we’ll soon offer admin-customizable messages in Chat.

The Workspace admin console manages user data so it remains in one secure location rather than fragmented across multiple point solutions.To help admins better manage privacy and security in Chat, while helping communities to thrive in their organizations, by the end of this year we’re rolling out content moderation in the admin console, which gives administrators a centralized tool for incident review.

Thoughtfully integrated

Along with enhanced privacy, security, and data protection, your teams benefit from the ways Chat connects with other Workspace apps to simplify common tasks and reduce context switching. Capabilities such as sharing Drive files and assigning Tasks directly in spaces, automatic muting of notifications during focus time, and using Chat in Gmail help reduce friction for Workspace customers.

“Google Chat has closed the gap [with other messaging tools] and added so much more additional integration with the rest of Workspace” — Rhys Phillips, Change and Adoption Leader, Airbus.

We’re also integrating Google Groups with spaces in Chat. By the end of the year, Workspace admins will be able to synchronize space membership as they provision new users, and streamline essential tasks like deploying apps for frontline workers, onboarding employees, and configuring announcement spaces for specific buildings, regions, or groups.

A great choice for modern messaging

With these innovations and the integration of Duet AI, we’re making Google Chat a stronger foundation for anytime collaboration — now and in the future. That focus resonates with our global customers as they continue to seek greater efficiency and value from the tools they already have:

“We’ve evaluated Google Chat every year for the past 5 years. This year, a combination of an $80,000 bill [from a competitor] and Google shipping everything we needed in Chat motivated us to make the switch. We were also able to migrate all of our data thanks to the team at CloudFuze,” said Jason Coutu, Czar of IT, Vendasta.

Getting started is easy: if you have Workspace, you already have Google Chat. And if you don’t have Workspace, you can explore the full set of capabilities, including the latest AI features in Google Chat, with a 14-day trial or by speaking with a Workspace customer specialist.

Welcome to the new Google Chat!