[MUSIC PLAYING]
MATT LESKE: Hello,
my name is Matt,
and I'm the product
lead for Hangouts Chat.
I'm going to talk to
you today about teams.
Because I believe that Hangouts
Chat is the single most
important thing you can
bring to your organizations
to improve team efficiency
and effectiveness.
And I know that's a
pretty bold statement.
But I'm going to
try and convince you
now about why that's the case.
First of all, when
we think about teams,
there's a couple of things
which I tend to think about.
The first one is people.
People is just a hiring problem.
It's all pretty straightforward.
I can't solve that
with chat, by the way.
The other thing that I think
a lot about is culture.
And as we break apart culture,
we think about a couple
of things.
The first one is values that
come down from our leadership.
And the second one is
how we work together
and how we bring culture
into our organization.
And there are three key
things around culture
and around how we communicate
that are important.
So I think about frequency.
I think about formality.
And I think about transparency.
To take one of those, think
about Google and Apple--
two widely successful companies.
The transparency within
those organizations
and how they share information
is vastly different.
At the same time, this
helps define the culture
of the organization.
And as we think
through this, there's
two key problems that we are
currently facing frequently.
The first one is
communication barriers
within the organization.
They can be across
functional barriers.
They can be across location.
And of course, they can be
as we grow, we develop teams,
and we could develop
divisions in the organization.
The second big
barrier that we face
is around this increasing
trend towards diversification
and distribution
of our workforce.
By 2020, a full 50%
of our organizations
is expected to be
working remotely.
And we hear that
as we hire people.
Everyone wants to work
from home, first thing.
Second thing is we
want work-life balance.
So we want to be able
to encourage family
time and that kind of thing.
And thirdly, as we
grow our organizations,
we have this need to expand
to other offices and things.
So the ability to communicate
across distances effectively
as teams fundamentally
defines our success
and our competitiveness
in a global space.
And so we looked at all of this.
And we really put out two key
principles here, two key ideas
that [INAUDIBLE] those for.
First of all, bringing
teams together
to be cohesive,
despite the barriers,
despite the locations.
The second thing here is
around fluid communication.
So where we think
about this is, like,
fast, less formal, but without
compromising on the security
you expect from an
enterprise product.
And that's where Hangouts
Chat really comes into it.
I'm going to walk through
the product itself,
so you can understand how
we're solving for this.
And there's three key things
that I want to outline here,
the construct of
the product itself.
The first one is
direct messaging.
You're all
super-familiar with this.
Billions of direct messages
are sent every day.
We use it for
family and friends.
We use it for business.
It's a common thing.
This is not a new problem.
And it's not a
new solution here,
since ICQ and AOL
messenger way back when.
Solutions been here
for a long time.
Wenjia, one of the product
managers on my team
is going to talk
to you about some
of the extra features we're
adding to Chat to make
direct messaging better.
But for now, I want to dive
deeply into rooms and our bot
platform.
And to talk through
this, I want to just kind
of walk through the
UX here and kind of
walk you through
what's happening.
So as you look down
the left-hand side,
you see rooms to find here.
And these are persistent
topic-based communication
forums, where people
come together in teams
and they work together.
And regardless if the
team is sitting next
to each other in an office or
on the other side of the world,
this is a common
leveling platform
for teams to work
together and communicate.
On the right-hand
side, what you see is,
obviously, people can
chat, as you would expect
from a product called Chat.
But also, you can share
documents and files.
You can throw out an emoji.
You can react to
what's going on there.
And the third thing
I'll mention here
is the fact that all of these
conversations are threaded.
They're clustered into topics.
And the threading here is
quite pivotal in that it
solves two key problems.
The first one is how
do we scale rooms.
That's fine if you have
a five person discussion.
But anything beyond 15
people, and this scale
is well up to 8,000 people, a
large company-wide discussion.
You will always have
parallel discussions ongoing.
So the ability to have
those parallel discussions
and to scale this solution
is really important.
The second thing that's
really important here
that threads [INAUDIBLE] is what
we call the catch-up problem.
So not having to
be there always,
keeping in contact,
complete FOMO,
like we normally
get from these team
messaging products, being able
to be away from your desk,
being out of the office
for a day or a week,
coming back and
not having to read
this constant stream of
consciousness from the team,
but look at, of this particular
topic, what am I interested in?
What is the update
in this topic?
I mentioned bot platforms, the
third construct in the product
itself.
The value of bot
platform is bringing
in functionality
from outside of Chat
into this team
collaboration space.
Pull out a few
quick examples here.
It could be functionality
inside G Suite.
So somebody comments on a
document, having those comments
instantly appear
within Chat, rather
than getting delivered
through email
and having to go in and
through that workflow.
A similar thing is
Salesforce integration.
So getting updates when you
need to contact a customer,
looking up customer details,
and logging that information
back into your CRM system.
So pulling that all together.
And the commonality
here is that there
are workflows that
the team does today.
But if you can bring that
together into one place,
have people work on not
together in the same place,
the cohesiveness of the
team comes together.
Because you have
that transparency
of the work going on.
You'll also hear in a moment
from one of our customers
who's going to talk about a bot
that they created themselves
to help with their
internal workflows.
With the power of
Google Cloud Platform,
we make it really,
really ridiculously easy
just to go and create a bot,
bring that together, and make
it live within a matter of
minutes, create things quickly.
So it's a really powerful
connection here between Chat
and the Cloud platform.
As you would expect, being
a core service for G Suite,
Chat integrates with other
parts of G Suite as well.
Simple examples here.
When you share a
document with the room,
we look at the permissions
on the document.
We look at who you're
trying to share it with.
If there's a mismatch, we
prompt you to give permissions
at that point.
That's the kind of thing that's
only possible when you're
part of the Suite itself.
Another simple example--
you're often in a discussion
where you're talking to people.
And you really need to have a
face-to-face discussion, really
simple, lightweight, one-click,
jump into a video chat,
have a quick video
chat with those people.
No need to go to a
separate location,
or log in, or any of that.
Very natural integration here.
And the third piece, which
I'll highlight around
the integration, is
around the integration
and the backwards compatibility
with the previous version
of Hangouts.
So you can take a team today
within your organization,
move it across the new product.
And then all the existing
chats-- so the group chats
will come through.
The direct messages
will come through.
You're not on an island
of this new product,
this new functionality that
the team needs to learn.
All the existing communications
still flow into the product.
A few final points here.
Google Hangouts Chat is
100% built for enterprises
and enterprise first product.
So it was built with the
ability to set your own policies
around.
How long do you want to retain
the information in chat rooms?
How long do you want to
retain the information
in direct messages?
Vault support, of course, so
all of your e-discovery needs
for legal holds, for
long-term archiving.
As you'd expect, strong security
and HIPAA and GDPR compliance.
The things you can expect
from every single G Suite
core service.
And the final point here,
which is pretty powerful,
it's available to all of you
now on basic business enterprise
and edu versions, completely
free of charge globally.
So it supports 28 languages.
There's no limits, no tears
of the product, 8,000 people
today in a room, support
for different clients,
including Desktop
clients, Mac and Windows.
And of course, we thought
a lot about all the users
in your organization.
So screen reader support,
having all your users
in your organization being
able to join conversations
and participant in those
conversations is important.
So across these
platforms, but also,
the mobile platforms as well.
So in summary, four points here.
Hangouts Chat can
definitely transform
the way your teams work.
Deeply integrated
with G Suite, it's
an enterprise first product,
and it's available globally
at no additional cost.
And with that,
I'm actually going
to introduce one
of our customers.
Jordi Adame is a chief
technology officer of Resuelve.
They've implemented
Hangouts Chat.
And it's fundamentally
changed the way
their business works and
their ability to scale.
To introduce Resuelve, I'm
going to play a quick video.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
[APPLAUSE]
JORDI ADAME: Hi, everybody.
I'm Jordi.
I'm the IT guy at Resuelve.
I will fix your computer.
So what's Resuelve?
It roughly translates
to resolve your debt.
What we do is we help people who
cannot pay their debts anymore,
people who cannot pay even the
minimum monthly credit card
payment.
How do we do this?
First, we will get you a
discount from your credit
towards.
In Mexico, we are able to
get discounts up to 78%.
That's amazing.
But we know you've
been struggling
with this debt for a long time.
So the second
thing we will do is
we will create the
savings program together.
Together, you and
us, we'll analyze
your financial situation
today and that [INAUDIBLE]
how much money you can really
save on a monthly basis.
It won't be easy.
The average program
lasts 18 months.
But together, we'll make this
journey together debt by debt,
month by month until
you're debt free.
Funny thing is this thing
started with a crisis
back in 2009, where
there was a global crisis
and people were having trouble
paying their debts and loans
all over the world.
And Mexico was
not the exception.
So our two founders
came up with the idea
of bringing this model to Mexico
with a clear mission of helping
Mexicans pay their debts.
But during the last years,
we've been working really,
really hard on our
global expansion,
starting four years
ago with Colombia.
Last year, we opened Argentina.
And this same month,
we just opened Spain.
Over these years, our
mission has changed.
We no longer want to help
only Mexicans, but anyone who
is unable to pay their debts.
It doesn't matter
where they live.
So it's going to be a big
challenge scaling a business
and maintaining it's
culture, vision,
core values, and customer
experience quality.
I joined Resuelve
about two years ago,
and things were
not easy back then.
We didn't have G Suite.
We had infinite email
threads or chains.
So you received an
email, and the whole body
was plus your name,
plus Jodi, in your case.
That's it, no context.
So you had to open the email.
You see the scroll
bar getting smaller
and smaller and smaller.
And you had to try to read
from bottom to top and right
to left.
That's kind of difficult.
That's not a great UX.
That will not scale.
Then if you wanted to contact
somebody at the office,
first, you had to
know their name.
Then you had to try to find
their email or find extension.
Their usual way
to accomplish this
was actually asking
some other employee.
Once you finally
contacted this person
that you wanted
to talk to, there
was an infinite email thread
agreeing on rooms, times,
platforms, and user names.
It was really hard.
So once you'd finally getting
to a Skype call with somebody,
it usually ended up with,
hey, let's do this by phone.
This is not working.
That will not scale ever.
It's no surprise that one
week after I joined Resuelve,
we were already
switching to G Suite.
So these two guys
at the back, they
are our current CEOs
in Spain and Argentina.
They still have to
meet and work together.
But it will be so inefficient.
So polluting and expensive to
fly them all over the world
just so they can work together.
So that's why we love
Hangouts so much.
There was a common scene
at the office this summer.
People from three
countries working
on a shared project about the
[INAUDIBLE] party of Resuelve.
But actually, they
were fighting over who
will win the World Cup.
Unfortunately, none of us did.
But the two things you
already know about Latino--
we love football-- obviously,
football, not soccer--
college football, and we
even name our meeting rooms
after football stadiums.
And we're extremely formal.
Every email we send has to have
a salutation, introduction,
three paragraph body,
conclusion, and a farewell.
It's like an email has to be a
letter addressed to the king.
It will not scale.
But even though it
brought us together
and is perfect for
long-distance, complex talks,
we still had the instant
communication problem
until we found Hangouts Chat.
There's an old Mexican saying
that says, everything you buy
has to be bueno,
bonito, and barato.
That's a rough translation.
Before there was
Hangouts Chat, we
tried every chat
solution available.
We tried Slack.
We tried Weaver, What'sApp
group, Telegram, Jabber, IRC.
We even tried a chat
block chain solution.
But transaction fees were
going through the-- no, that's
not true.
But some of these solutions
were good and nice.
But they were expensive.
Or some of them were cheap, and
the quality was not so good,
until we found Hangouts Chat.
And how hard could it be
to introduce this new tool
to 1,200 employees
in many countries?
It was so easy,
so easy actually.
This is what we did that's true.
The engineering team, we tried
it for a couple of weeks.
They were [INAUDIBLE] that
these were the solutions
we were looking for.
So after that, we just
created a global group,
invited the whole
company, and that's it.
That's all we did.
Everybody was on Chat.
We didn't have to
create any account.
Everybody was already there.
That's pretty nice.
We didn't have to install
any software on any computer.
That's interesting.
We didn't have to train anybody.
It feels like everybody
just knew how to use it.
That's quality software to me.
And the best of all, we didn't
have to pay any extra for this.
That scales.
Today, I spend most of my life,
most of my day life on Chat.
I rarely send an email to a
Resuelve employee anymore.
And I don't seem to be alone.
Last month, 80% of our
internal communication
was done via Chat.
We still sent tons of
emails, but that number
seems to be going down
and down every month.
And now that Chat is widely
adopted throughout the company,
some groups are
starting to appear.
We use Chat not only for
business or work-related stuff,
but we also use it
for fun, or sports
bracket betting, or local
sport teams organization,
or even to find out
what's for lunch the day
at the dining room.
And organically,
some support groups
appeared, for example, tech
support groups, HR support
groups, or specific
groups for support
about our savings program,
which is not really, really
easy to understand sometimes.
And we noticed that there were
a lot of questions that were
being asked a lot repeatedly.
It's OK to answer a
question once or even twice.
But having the same question
answered once and again
and again and again,
that won't scale.
So we tried to solve this.
We tried a
knowledge-bench approach.
We created documents, and
we sent them to the company.
But it didn't work that well.
Because people have
specific questions.
They want to know
if we can negotiate
with American Express.
They do not want to read a
whole document to find out this.
They want a simple
yes or no question.
So in one of our
monthly hackathons,
a huge team of developers
of one was working
on a personal assistant bot.
And so Coyote was born.
What is Coyote?
Coyote is a bot, obviously,
in Hangouts Chat.
It's your personal assistant,
your personal coach,
your personal bookie, chef.
It's whatever you want it to be.
It can answer real simple
questions, like how many
vacation days do I have left?
I only have five days left.
That's not a lot.
It can answer more complex
questions, like do we negotiate
with American Express?
This seems to be a
really straightforward
yes or no question.
But there's more to it.
Coyote knows you live in Spain.
So Coyote will tell you about
American Express Spain, not
about American Express
in Colombia or Mexico.
Coyote is smart.
But sometimes questions can
get really tricky, so tricky
that not even Coyote
knows how to answer this.
This is a real situation we
had a couple of months ago.
There was this Mexican guy
that used to live in Mexico.
He moved to Argentina.
He has debts with
banks in Mexico--
you remember?
It was very complicated.
And he was now
back in Argentina,
and he wanted to
join the program.
So somebody asked
this to Coyote.
Nobody knew, not even
Coyote, what to do.
So Coyote need some human help.
And even if I don't
like it, humans
can come in handy
from time to time.
We have a Hangouts group
called Coyote answers, where
a bunch of highly-trained humans
take care of these matters.
So the thing is Coyote
gets the question.
It will send it
back to this group.
People in this group
will discuss an answers.
One they have a
consensus on an answer,
they send it back to Coyote.
Coyote will learn the answer
and send it back to the user.
But it will not learn
just the question.
It will learn the situation.
We're using
DialogFlow for these.
So the next time anybody
asked the same question,
even if it's a
different phrasing,
Coyote will know how to answer.
Coyote scales.
It's really smart.
So how we built it.
It was really, really simple.
So we used Hangouts Chat as a
front end, even for the user
or for the group of people where
they are answering questions.
We use DialogFlow for the
natural language processing
back end.
And we built everything
in Elixir App.
It's deployed using
Docker and Kubernetes.
The only thing the
Elixir app does
is connecting this to APIs.
You can easily have any
bot running in 15 minutes.
It's really, really easy to do.
This is the Coyote
trainers, or tamers,
as they like to be called.
They are around 40 people
of all the [INAUDIBLE]
in Resuelve from my teams,
contracts, maintenance sales.
Everybody just help
working on training Coyote.
Nobody asked them to do it.
They just want to help.
And it's really amazing
what people can do
if they have a clear mission.
In this case, they
just want to help.
They just want to train Coyote.
And just like that,
we have a mission.
We want to help the
world pay their debts.
And with really hard work,
and partners like Google,
and tools like Google
Chat, I'm pretty
sure we're going to be
able to accomplish it.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
WENJIA ZHU: Hi, I'm Wenjia.
I'm a product manager
on Hangouts Chat.
Today, I'm excited
to showcase features
about our upcoming
innovations that
empower our mission of building
happy and productive teams.
We want to help you have fun.
We want to help you focus.
And we want to help
you be more productive.
So let's start with fun first.
Raise your hand
if you used emojis
at least once in the last week.
Wow, that's a lot of you.
Cool.
Well, almost
everyone online today
uses emoji or some sort
of visual expression.
Fun fact-- last week
was national Emoji Day.
But emojis and visual expression
are not just about fun.
They're also good
for engagement.
For example, studies have
shown that using emojis
in Gmail subject lines can drive
a 20% increase in open/read.
Expressive features
are also not just
important in the social
and consumer world,
they've also proven to be
important in the workplace.
Communication
styles have evolved.
And oftentimes,
expressive styles
are even preferred
over simple text.
Emojis, in particular, are
a fun and effective way
of accurately representing
your thoughts and feelings
to help you build stronger
personal connections
with your team.
At Hangouts Chat, we offer
efficient emoji search
at your fingertips.
So you can find the
perfect one that expresses
how you feel in the moment.
To take it a little
bit further, today, I'm
excited to introduce a new
feature called Emoji Reactions.
With this feature, you
can quickly or creatively
react to any message to express
support, humor, or empathy.
What that means is you
can celebrate good news.
You can acknowledge a request.
Or you can take a quick poll
amongst many other things.
We believe this feature
will go a long way
in helping you
build team culture
and help everyone feel included.
So let's look at some examples
for how reactions can be used.
I'm going to show
you two examples
from my personal experience
using this feature on our team.
For this first
example, I want you all
to imagine a common scenario.
You're a newbie,
and you're joining
a team for the first time.
How would you like to be
introduced or welcomed?
We could do this over email.
We could even do this over Chat.
But let's look at an
example of using Reactions.
Sherryll here is
welcoming Max to the team.
And in case you're
wondering, does anyone
really use that many emojis?
The answer is yes, or at
least we do on my team.
OK, let's look at a
more serious example.
So now, imagine
that you're working
on an important document.
And you just want to get a
quick sense for how everyone
feels before you share it.
Again, you can have these
long back-and-forths on email,
or chat, or another forum.
Or you could take a quick, clean
pull using Emoji Reactions.
So Stanley, in this
case, wants a thumbs up
if people think that document
is good to share or a stop sign
if they think there are
still things to work on.
I just showed you two examples
for how Reactions can be used.
But I look forward to
seeing what you all do.
Let's switch gears
a bit and talk
about focus and productivity.
Our CEO Sundar is a great
advocate of digital wellness,
saying that great technology
should improve life and not
distract from it.
So how do we build
technology that is
both responsible and effective?
At Hangouts Chat,
we want to build
tools that help you
focus and also enable
you to scale and do more.
Today's landscape can
be challenging for those
seeking to be productive
in the workplace.
Contact switching, multitasking
are daily challenges
to productivity.
Did you know, for example, that
hearing a mobile notification
makes you three times more
likely to make a mistake?
And once you're interrupted,
it can take up to 23 minutes
to get back on track.
That is a lot of time.
So we want to help you
manage your attention.
With Do Not Disturb,
you can turn off
notifications for
any period of time,
so you can just focus
on getting stuff done.
Choose anywhere from 30
minutes to up to eight hours.
For all other
times, Working Hours
allows you to set
your own schedule.
So you can decide for yourself
what the right balance
between work and home.
You can take control
of your own schedule
and decide when you
want or don't want
to be engaged and notified.
Because we believe that
disconnecting at home
is just as important as
getting stuff done at work.
So to recap, Do Not
Disturb and Working Hours
help you focus and disconnect.
But we want to help
you do even more.
Everybody juggles multiple
tasks on a daily basis.
And it can be hard to always
be productive and responsive.
So what if we could reduce
your effort on these tasks
and help you be faster,
so that, as a result,
you have more time to do things,
like solve complex problems,
think of new ideas, or
execute on strategy?
What if Hangouts Chat could
genuinely and intelligently
anticipate your
needs in the moment?
Luckily, Hangouts
Chat weaves together
products across G Suite, so that
we can expand your capabilities
beyond just messaging.
We provide you the right
tools at the right time.
And I'm going to walk
you through three
highlights today
for how we do this.
One around how we can help
you manage your documents
more effectively.
Two around scheduling
meetings easier.
And three around
just being faster.
So starting with documents,
as Matt mentioned earlier,
we have a bot platform
that brings together
capabilities across G Suite
and other applications.
The Drive Bot is one good
example of how we do this.
Now most of you have probably
collaborated on a document
at some point in time.
The challenge is
you don't always
know exactly who you want
to share your document with
and what kind of permission
you want them to have.
Do you want them to be
only viewing your document,
or do you want them to be a
fully active collaborator?
The good news is you don't have
to worry about any of that.
Because the Drive Bot will
send you a direct message
any time someone wants
to access your document.
And it'll also notify
you of any comments.
This way, you can stay on
top of all of your documents
without getting distracted and
without changing your workflow.
And by the way, all of this
is happening in real time.
And if you don't think
this is a big deal,
our studies have shown
that granting permission
is eight times faster using
the Drive Bot in Hangouts Chat.
Everyone's favorite
topic-- meetings.
So personally, I find it
very challenging to schedule
meetings, in general,
and even more difficult
when it involves multiple people
across multiple time zones.
That's where the Meet
Bot is really helpful.
It uses natural language
processing and machine learning
intelligence to automatically
schedule meetings
for everyone in the chat room.
And it works with your Google
Calendar and the Google Meet
tool.
Again, you don't have to
change what you're doing,
so it doesn't disrupt
your workflow.
You don't get distracted.
And you don't lose any time.
I have one more feature to
introduce around helping
you be more productive.
I think we all wish that we
could just do things faster.
And responding to
chat messages faster
is definitely one
area of improvement.
If there is an answer
you can give quickly
to unblock your team,
I don't think anyone
loves to keep people waiting.
That's why I'm
excited to announce
Smart Reply in Hangouts Chat
to help increase your speed
and efficiency.
This feature will be coming
out in the next few weeks.
Smart Reply in Hangouts
Chat uses the same machine
learning intelligence
as Smart Reply in Gmail.
So for those of
you who've already
used Smart Reply
in Gmail, you'll
find this feature very familiar.
Our technology understands
the context of your messages
and automatically suggests
three possible responses.
You can select any of them
to respond right away,
or you can customize it further.
So we'll just look at
one more quick example
of how to use Smart Reply.
This one, hopefully, should
be relatable to a lot of you.
I hate running
behind to a meeting.
It creates a lot
of stress for me.
And it creates
stress for my team.
So what if when my
team is asking me, hey,
are you going to make it?
Where are you?
And I'm still waiting
for the elevator.
It would be great
if I could just
use Smart Reply to let them
know that I am on my way.
Let's just take a
quick look at that.
I just introduced five
different features today
around fun, focus,
and productivity.
And we're going to continue
to build and innovate more.
What I want you to
remember today is this--
Hangouts Chat can transform
your workplace and team
through its deep
integrations with G Suite.
We were built for the
enterprise and we're free.
So at the end of
the day, we want
to be your single
workstation within G Suite,
connecting all of your
productivity tools
in one place, so we can
help you be your best self
and do more along the way.
Thank you.
And I'm going to
move to questions.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
