Google Hangouts’ new features make work meetings slightly less annoying

If you know anything about Google’s messaging strategy in the last few years, you know that it’s been a bit of a mess.Now, Google is getting back into the team collaboration space. Google’s set of office tools,called G Suite, is splitting its Hangouts app into two parts — Hangouts Meet, and Hangouts Chat.

The new tool features “rooms” and threaded conversations.

Chat also includes a new bot for automatically scheduling meetings: When called up, @meet will compare Google Calendar schedules of chat participants to automatically pick an open time.

Hangouts Meet is the video portion of the Hangouts service, and it’s been streamlined and cleaned up to make meeting with teams easier.

A blog post has more detail.