Five Compelling Reasons to Use Chat in Google Workspace

Google Chat (formerly known as Google Hangouts chat) is a team messaging application that includes rooms for teams and projects. 

Following are the Five Reasons why you should use Google Chat :

1. Discussions : You will be invited to chat rooms, where you will be able to discuss, share information or even send direct messages to anyone in your team. Google Chat is similar to Slack channel.  In Google Chat, conversations are shown in threads.  If you have to reply to any of the threads, just pull up the particular thread and reply directly on it. To increase productivity during discussions you can also share docs, sheets, slides or files from Google Drive to support your cases.
2. Search Icon : As the name suggests search icon in Google Chat will help you to search people, rooms and bots. It helps in searching your preferred messages in the left sidebar. Once you go through your preferred conversations, you can easily click on the reply button and restart the discussion again.
3. Google Meet : Sometimes a conversation text is not enough, you might need to jump on a call. To help in these circumstances Google Chat provides Google Meet where you can do video calls with the entire team or individually. To start the Google Meet you can either send the message to that person and directly click the Google Meet button or click the meet button in any reply or new conversations.
4. Notifications : Team discussions are vital but sometimes constant messages popping up, can also distract you from your work. Unlike other messaging applications, Google Chat helps you to calm the constant notifications by allowing you to only focus on the message threads that you wish to follow. You can follow and Unfollow a particular thread at any time. You can also completely turn off the notifications from chat settings.
5. Hidden Features : You can add bold and italics formatting in your chats. Using underscore for italics like  _example_ and  using asterisk for bold like *example*. You can also use various smileys and emojis in your chats to express your emotions during conversations. 

Google Chat Bots:

Through Google Chat not only you can chat with your teammates, but also you can chat with your applications. 

You can add bots to your chat or rooms . Some of the popular chatbots are GIPHY, Kayak, Dialpad, Wrike, Zenefits, MeisterTask and many more.

These bots are very helpful. Kayak bots help you to book flights in ongoing chat. Whereas, Meet bots help you and your teammates to schedule a meeting through a calendar invitation. Some other examples are GIPHY bots that help you to add GIFs or a Polly bot that helps you to conduct polls during your conversations.