Isolve this problem by ignoring social media altogether. If people want to talk to me, they can email, call or text me.
I don’t see this as a problem since it doesn’t affect me. I only do my searches directly on PornHub. /s
Wait we need an assistant in our chats? Am I misunderstanding the purpose of chat these days?
Wonder why the xkcd comic left Jabber/XMPP out.
For the same reason all the modern, heavily used chat clients do?
OHHHHHHH
oh
I made myself sad.
The Assistant is like having Google Now in chat. It can provide contextual help. Have you ever googled something relating to a conversation? The Assistant can jump in and do that for you and answer within the context of the chat.
Whether we need it is another matter, of course.
I’ve used the Assistant in Allo to tell my wife where I am and how long it’ll take me to meet her somewhere. Or to look for certain types of restaurants when planning to meet with a buddy.
When I feel old because I am not using the latest gizmo like I do right now, I just jump over to one of these other topics where people talk about the glory of games or movies that were released before I was born. I used to use Hangouts all the time as the primary voice chat after SKYPE starting going screwball which was after YIM, which was after MSN Live which were all after AIM. Now I use Discord because Hangouts hates my headset and the sound level is always messy with gaming.
I still use my 6-digit ICQ number. I’d upgrade to a different client but I’m worried I could miss a warning that PKs just showed up at Covetous. I don’t want to lose all these harpy feathers.
\21270688. Sadly I forgot the password and the email it’s tied to hasn’t even existed in close to 15 years. Alas.
2118015 hotmail account it was tied to got hacked
Is anybody else around here using Steam as their only way to discuss with friends?
… maybe I do need more friends?!
Personally I’d much rather do that in a dedicated browser, so I can do more detailed searching without cluttering up/interfering with the chat. Phones can multitask now, it doesn’t all need to be in one app. And the current setup with everything getting its own bot, rather than one bot to rule them all, just leads to weird fragmentation of functionality. Google Assistant can find certain things in some contexts but not in others. That makes no sense.
I use Steam chat all the time, never the Steam voice chat as that’s laggy as hell from my experience.
Hangouts I use more than any other chat client though, by a substantial margin too, and I’ve never had any issues with it. It behaves much like WhatsApp for real-time or ‘async’ chatting, but from the convenience of my email tab on my desktop machines.
I’ve got to say, I never quite get the ire that some of these clients attract. For years now, my friends and I have been using Skype whilst gaming. We have the odd hiccup related to client updates or being unable to add certain contacts to existing group calls but the quality and convenience is what keeps us using it. I’ve tried Discord and while that’s super simple to use as well, we frequently got garbled voices that dropped out and some people couldn’t hear each other at all, necessitating a switch to the browser client which worked fine but forfeited mic control to your browser. Still, too much faffing around. Mumble was great but fiddly for most folk who don’t use it frequently.
I’ll keep exploring other options but it’s not so much a case of what works for me as it is a case of what works for everyone else I communicate and game with too.
I assume if I’m logged in to one gmail account I can’t use Google Hangouts with another gmail account at the same time? I have a personal gmail account and a professional one (and Google makes that a pain in the rump.)
Both the web and mobile clients let you log in with multiple accounts. You’ll need multiple tabs for the web version.
Yep. Very easy to remain logged into both but separate tabs if you want both “up”.
Hangouts Meet is out for iOS and Android.
Ok Hangouts is dropping sms, so what is actually recommended now? I prefer one app, not too many friends on iMessage and not a big user of rich texting.