Google Announces Major Redesign For Gmail; Know About New 'Rooms' Feature

Gmail will undergo a major overhaul and have integrated tools that optimise its usage.

Representational Image (Getty)

San Francisco: Google has announced a major overhaul for Gmail that will expand the service beyond emails and become a productivity hub for the workplace.  The new design shows four tabs at the bottom of a user's screen: Mail, Chat, Meet for video calling, and Rooms, CNET reported on Wednesday. 'Rooms' is similar to ‘Slack rooms' which lets people on the same team at work collaborate in real-time. "In Google's version, people can chat, swap files and edit Google Docs without switching tabs," the report mentioned. "There's the task of bringing them together, and the task of making them greater than the sum of their parts," Javier Soltero, head of Google's GSuite division for productivity apps, was quoted as saying.

We've added the #GoogleMeet tab into Gmail's mobile app for users to quickly start a meeting with friends, colleagues and more 👷🏾‍♀️👨🏼‍💻👩🏿‍🎨👨🏻‍🔬→ https://t.co/Jm1e68YVNm pic.twitter.com/OsWz5w3XYi

— Gmail (@gmail) July 13, 2020

Google Meet usage is surging. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said recently that it was adding 3 million new users a day during the pandemic and has 100 million meeting participants a day. The video meet for Android has surpassed over 10 crore downloads globally on Google Play Store. Gmail currently has more than 1 billion users. Gmail over the last couple of months has added a couple of new features to its Gmail app for iOS, including support for Siri shortcuts when sending emails, and adding attachments to emails from the iOS files app. WATCH | Reliance AGM: Mukesh Ambani's big announcements, Jio grips every sector