At its annual developer conference last week, search engine giant Google introduced an update to one of its most wanted features in Google+, Hangouts video chat. The revised Hangouts combines video chat with Google Talk, a text chat system that became a part of Gmail and Google+ Messenger.
It is an Android application that provides text chat along with photo sharing and video in Google+. It is now extended to multiple platforms, while Hangouts is available as a Chrome Web extension, an Android app, an iOS app and a web service within Google+. New features will include ability to send emoticons, optional conversation history, real-time activity indicators, a unified cross-device notification system and also group video chat, all of them being free.
Hangouts is supposed to unify real-time of Google’s communications services but it is not there yet. There are some problems Google Voice has with Hangouts and Android customers are not able to use the app on the AT&T network.
A statement was issued by the telecom operator which said that it plans to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all of its customers, regardless of data plan.
