Google Updates Hangouts For Android To Make It More Smarter And Fun To Use

Google has updated its Hangouts app for Android, making it a multipurpose communication tool. 

The update adds a couple of new and powerful features along with visually appealing stickers and video filters. 

The updated app, based on the natural-language processing, can figure out what the next person has asked for and offers the other person to do the needful. For example, if another person asks for location, it can offer the asked person an option to send location information without having to do anything. 

The updated app is available for Android and is submitted to Apple for approval on iOS. 

"This is one of the most familiar experiences -- people are trying to connect in physical world," Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product at Google, said at the LeWeb conference. "We use machine learning and natural language processing to give an assist. With one click, you can share your location. This is entirely optional," he added. 

On the visual side, users of Hangouts can now apply multiple video filters while video chatting. They can also send stickers and Easter eggs such as 'woot' or 'happy birthday.'

Google doesn't treat Hangouts as an app to serve a niche need. "It's texting, it's telephony, it's one-to-one, it's many-to-many, it's consumer, it's enterprise," Horowitz said. "It's not like throwing a dart and hitting one app like ephemeral imaging. We're trying to do something broader that helps people communicate wherever they are using whatever products they prefer."