Whether it’s prioritising important conversations, quickly catching up on unread messages or customising notifications to reduce distractions, Google Chat offers multiple features to help you stay organised and on top of your communication.
Keep reading to explore how you can work more efficiently in Google Chat with features such as custom sections, smart replies and conversation summaries. Specifically, we cover:
- Organising conversations and customising your experience
- Finding what you need faster
- Controlling notifications
- Leveraging AI-powered features
- Using Google Chat apps
💡 Discover part two of our Become a Google Chat Expert series where we explore a range of features to help you enhance your communication and foster stronger connections with your colleagues. Read it here.
Organising conversations and customising your experience
Prioritise important discussions. Do you frequently message a particular colleague or space in 💬 Google Chat? Are you struggling to find that conversation? Try 📌 pinning your important conversations to the top of your direct message or space lists. This keeps them within easy reach and ensures that they remain at the top of the section in the left-hand navigation panel even as new messages from other conversations come in. You and your team can also pin key messages, links and files within a conversation and access them through the centralised Board tab.
Group related conversations together. To make it easier to find and manage chats in a way that suits you and your workflow, you can group conversations into custom sections in the left-hand navigation panel. Custom sections can contain direct messages, group messages and spaces and are particularly useful for grouping conversations by similar topic, project or importance into one easily-accessible place.
💡 To make conversations more easily identifiable, you can also rename group messages instead of leaving them as the default list of participant names. This means you can give the conversation a more meaningful and descriptive title, helping you quickly locate it when needed.
Personalise your Google Chat experience. Whether you prefer a more spacious layout or a condensed view, you can tailor the look of your conversations to fit your style with two options: "Comfortable" and “Compact”. You can also enable 🌙 dark mode to create a more comfortable and customised viewing experience, especially in low-light conditions.
Turn messages into personal action items. Are you chatting with a colleague and want to turn one of their messages into an action item for later? In Google Chat, you can quickly convert messages into personal ✅ Google Tasks complete with due dates and descriptions, all without switching tabs.
💡 You can also generate tasks from messages in spaces. Unlike direct messages, creating tasks from a space will notify all members and they will be able to see and edit the task – which can be useful in group projects or collaborative spaces.
Finding what you need faster
Stay on top of conversations with Home. The Google Chat 🏡 Home view brings all of your conversations, including direct messages, group messages and spaces, into one centralised feed, making it easy to monitor and quickly catch up on recent activity in one place. Messages are displayed chronologically and you can filter your view to focus on unread messages or followed 🧵 threads. There’s also a split-pane view that lets you open and reply to messages without leaving Home.
Never lose an important message again. Alongside the Home view, Google Chat has dedicated 🏷 Mentions and ⭐ Starred views to help you stay organised amidst a busy flow of communication. The Mentions view displays a list of messages in which you were tagged, in chronological order. These are often the most time-sensitive and important messages so having them all in one place ensures you never miss anything crucial. Meanwhile, the Starred view keeps all of your starred messages together for easy future reference. Both views are accessible via shortcuts in the left-hand navigation panel.
Get more from Google Chat search. The search functionality in Google Chat makes it quick and easy to find the right message, file or conversation. Simply enter keywords into the search bar to see results across all conversation types. You can sort results by relevance or date and refine your search with filters such as sender, file type, whether the message appears in a space or direct message and more. For even more precision, use search operators to build custom queries, including the option to exclude certain messages from your results.
💡 Deselect the “Only conversations I’m in” filter to expand your search and see valuable information from spaces across your organisation of which you are not a member but which you can see based on access permissions.
Access all conversation-related artefacts in one place. Is your team often sharing documents, screenshots and links in a conversation? Are you looking for an easy way to access all of these resources in one place? The “Shared” tab, which is available in direct messages, group messages and spaces, pools all 📂 files, 🔗 links, and 📸 media shared during a conversation. This allows you to find relevant items without searching or scrolling through messages. Within the Shared tab, you can also sort content by category or by the date it was shared.
Pin important messages and resources for easy reference. The Board tab in Google Chat is another way to easily access key messages, files and links. Unlike the Shared tab, which automatically captures everything shared in a conversation, the Board tab acts as a bulletin board where you and other people in the conversation can choose to 📌 pin the most important messages or resources, giving you more control over what information stays easily accessible. The Board tab is available in all Chat conversation types and can be kept open as a side panel for easy reference to key information. By default, all participants can update the board, although 🚀💼 space managers can restrict this if needed.
Taking control of your notifications
Tailor notifications to your preferences. Whether you’re starting a direct message, group message or space, you’ll receive notifications for every new message or mention. Fortunately, you can customise 🔔 notification settings for each conversation individually to suit your preferences and bring attention to the conversations that require your attention the most. You can choose between the following notification options, which will send alerts for:
- Every new message and thread, even ones you do not follow
- Only messages in the main conversation and replies to threads which you follow
- Only messages that mention you and replies to threads which you follow
- Nothing – you will receive no notifications at all from this conversation
Reduce distractions by muting noisy conversations. Another way to stay focused on what matters is by 🔕 muting specific conversations that aren’t relevant to you at the moment. Unlike the “None” notification option, muted conversations are moved to the bottom of your conversation list, won’t appear in the Home view and won’t show notification badges – unless you’re directly mentioned. This keeps your conversation lists clean and free from distractions.
Block out all distractions for maximum focus. Want to temporarily stop all Google Chat notifications to concentrate or to disconnect from work? Instead of muting conversations one by one, set your Chat status to ⛔ “Do Not Disturb” (DND) to silence all notifications instantly. You can create a custom DND schedule that automatically mutes notifications for when you want to remain uninterrupted at specific times, such as during a regular lunch break or on the weekends.
💡 When you set 🎧 focus time in Google Calendar, your Google Chat status automatically switches to DND for the scheduled duration. Once your focus time ends, Chat notifications will be unmuted automatically.
Leveraging AI-powered features
Send messages faster and with fewer mistakes. To help you write messages more efficiently and accurately, Google Chat has two AI-powered features called “smart reply” and “smart compose”. Smart reply automatically suggests up to three quick, context-based responses to help you respond to messages faster and with less effort; the suggestions will appear above the reply box and can be easily inserted. Meanwhile, smart compose suggests relevant phrases in-line as you type, enabling you to craft messages quickly whilst minimising the chance of spelling and grammar errors. Both features are available in Google Chat on web and mobile.
💡 Smart reply is also available in Gmail whilst smart compose can be used in both Gmail and Google Docs.
Quickly catch up on conversations with summaries. Conversations can move pretty fast. Summaries are available for spaces and it’s also available for all unread conversations directly from the Home view. They allow you to get key points from a discussion, making it easier to jump back in without scrolling through every chat message.
Use the Gemini side panel in Google Chat. You can talk with Gemini about your conversations directly in Google Chat. You can ask Gemini to assist with tasks such as summarising messages, identifying action items and finding specific details about a conversation – all without leaving the direct message, group message or space you’re in. The Gemini side panel is also available in Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides.
Do more with Google Chat apps
Connect apps to Google Chat to automate work and save time on tasks. Google Chat apps allow you to access and interact with other services from within Google Chat, eliminating the need to switch between different applications to get things done. You can manage tasks, automate workflows and receive notifications containing important information without leaving the Google Chat interface. For example, you can:
- Get notifications about recent Drive activity, respond to and resolve comments in Docs, Sheets and Slides and manage file access requests using the Google Drive Chat app
- Create, assign and track tasks with the Asana Chat app
- Receive alerts for PagerDuty incidents and take action by acknowledging, resolving or recording new incidents with the PagerDuty Chat app
- Search for accounts, contacts, leads and opportunities using the Salesforce Chat app
These are just a few examples of how Chat apps can help you and your team complete tasks and work more efficiently in Chat. See a complete list of Chat apps available from Google here.
If there’s no Chat app for the functionality you need, you can build your own. Experienced 🧑💻 developers can use the Chat API, and there’s also a no-code option using AppSheet that can quickly and easily hook into other custom apps you’ve created within AppSheet.
Discover more Google Chat tips and features
In part two of our Become a Google Chat Expert series we cover a range of tips and features for enhancing communication and building meaningful connections with your team. Discover how you can use announcement-only spaces for effective mass communication, in-line threading to organise conversations, custom emoji to express yourself authentically and much more!
Note: this blog post was updated on 18th February 2025 to reflect the introduction of the Board tab and the ability to rename group messages.