Google has today announced a new version of Hangouts for Android that brings 16 new sticker packs, new video calling filters and smart suggestions.
This latter feature will recognize key words or phrases in your chat and make contextually relevant suggestions, like if you type “where are you?” when trying to meet up with someone, it will present a one-tap option to share your location on a map.
Alongside new penguins, pirates, koala and cat stickers (among others), the company also introduced a range of new filters that can be applied to video conversations, including sepia, vignette, black and white, and more.
Handily, conversations will now also feature “last-seen” time stamps to let you know if the person you’re typing to is actually there or not.
Some of these new features make use of the natural language processing (NLP) and AI tech Google acquired with its purchase of Emu in August.
These updates weren’t available to update for TNW at the time of publishing, which suggests they may be rolling out gradually to users. The update will also be headed to iOS soon enough – the app has already been submitted to the App Store, so is now just awaiting approval from Apple.
➤ Hangouts: now smarter, faster, and a lot more fun [Rhett Robinson – Google+]
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