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Over the past month or so we’ve seen a bunch of rumors and leaks about Babel. Which is supposedly Google’s new unified chat service. Which is supposed to unify Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, Google Drive Chat and Hangouts (with Google Voice coming a bit later). This morning many of us found something interesting with Google Drive.
The post first surfaced over in the Google Docs and Drive Community on Google+. Evidentally there is a new form of chat for Google Drive now available. Now it appears that this is only for uploaded documents like word docs, pictures, etc. It doesn’t work on any Google docs as of yet. As you can see in the image above, it looks a lot like chat on Google+, except of course it’s with Google Drive. The user also said that the new chat client has the ability to play a sound every time a new message hits. Which could get annoying if you have a document publicly available.
We did test this out, and it does work on documents that I’ve uploaded to Google Drive. But no one had the documents open, so I wasn’t able to chat.
So what does this mean for Babel? Well it means that it might actually be happening. As you can tell Google is working on their chat clients. So this could either be them getting them all ready for Babel, or just upgrading so they work better. Either is fine with us. So it looks like Babel might actually be happening. This just makes us even more excited for Google I/O which is less than a month away.
How many of you have seen the new chat in Google docs? What do you think about it? I actually quite like it, and I may even use it now when I’m collaborating with people on different projects. Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below.