It’s a good goal, but it comes at a cost: adding everything to everything has made some of Google’s services cluttered and complicated. Soltero has been preaching this idea of “reachability” for most of his tenure at Google, and it has led Google to integrate Meet and Chat into so many of its other services. “It’s really important and powerful to be able to reach you that way,” Soltero says, “and allow you then to decide whether you want to be reached or not, as opposed to having to manage all of these different identities and deal with the consequences.”

Google’s hoping it can use Gmail addresses and phone numbers to bring all that together. Our digital lives are filled with a million different chat apps, each with its own rules and norms and contact list, some for work purposes and some for personal ones. “What’s been really important is understanding how people make the choice as to what tool they’re going to use, for what purpose, in what circumstance,” says Javier Soltero, the head of Google Workspace. Pretty soon, there will be only Google Meet, and Google’s hoping it can be the one calling app users need for just about everything in their lives.īy bringing them both together, Google’s hoping it can solve some of what ails modern communication tools. Google announced today that it’s combining two of its video-calling apps, Duo and Meet, into a single platform.

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