[MUSIC PLAYING]
RAMESH NAIR: Hi, I'm Ramesh, a product
manager on Google Workspace, based out of Waterloo, Canada.
Over the past few months, I've had the chance
to speak to many developer partners
on the capabilities they'd like to see as part of Google Chat's
Developer Platform.
While the developers I talked to were
curious about developing on Google Chat,
many were looking for more functionality.
That's why I'm excited to share today
some of the new features that our team has
been working on that help address many of those requests.
Let's get started.
Whether you are an independent software vendor looking
to integrate your service into Google Chat or someone
who develops internal apps for your organization,
you can use Chat's Developer Platform
to help users accomplish their most important workflows more
quickly right from Google Chat.
If you already develop for Google Chat,
you may be familiar with some of the platform's existing
functionality.
If you're new to building for Google Chat,
there is already great functionality
you could take advantage of.
Let's go over some of the existing functionality first.
Let's consider the scenario of an internal DevOps team
at a fictional enterprise looking
to make the process of desk booking easier in the company's
new hybrid workplace.
Let's see how this team can use some of the existing
functionality of Google Chat to help make this workflow easier.
First, link previews.
When someone shares a link in chat,
your app can show the user a preview of that link
if the URL path is registered to your app.
Here, you can see the desk booking app shows information
from deskbooking.acme.com links, helping users share
their desk location with colleagues, for example.
Next, slash commands allow users to discover and execute
quick actions.
For example, a command to quickly
book a desk at the office, as you can see here.
Finally, Chat's interactive cards and dialogues
make presenting or gathering information
a snap, including widgets like dropdowns and radio buttons.
So users can easily book their perfect desk.
As you can see, Google Chat's existing functionality already
makes Chat apps useful tools for simplifying
workflows and helping users get more done.
Now that we've discussed existing capabilities that
are generally available, let's talk
about two new major capabilities that are
available in Developer Preview.
New card interface improvements, updates
to Google Chat's existing cards that significantly
improve how Chat apps present information
and allow user interaction.
And new Chat API resources and methods,
which allow developers to go beyond the concept of chat
bots to build powerful Chat apps that
allow users to accomplish even more workflows right from Chat.
More on the Chat API later.
But let's start first with the card interface improvements,
which are available under our Developer Preview program.
These improvements to Google Chat's cards
allow you to build compelling and easy to use interfaces
in Chat.
Let's return back to our internal team
building the desk booking app.
Now, that team itself is a DevOps team,
responsible for everything from product development
to operations.
Let's follow this team as they plan out,
build, and troubleshoot the desk booking Chat app,
and see some of the new improvements in action
with some of the DevOps tools they use every day.
First, all DevOps teams need to plan tasks and work seamlessly
across cross-functional teams.
Here, we see our desk booking team
collaborating on a shared task using the Asana Chat app.
Someone on the team, Ann, has just
created a new task in Asana.
And that task appears automatically in Chat.
So that Ann's teammates are kept in the loop.
You could see that cards appear modern
and feature an easy to use interface,
thanks to the new improvements.
Cards now use Material Design and are better suited
for display on any device, whether it
is on a web browser, or on a phone, or tablet.
Card widgets, like dropdowns and checklists,
are now editable right from the chat stream.
So the team members here can edit tasks and change assignees
on the fly without breaking up their conversation.
Once the work is planned at a high level,
many DevOps teams use a tool like Jira
to track their individual tasks and sprints.
Here, we see the example of another team member, Lori,
posting to this team space a link to the Jira ticket
she's working on.
Since the team space has the Jira Chat app installed,
it can automatically attach a card previewing information
from the link and let Lori's teammates get context and take
action without having to switch tabs.
These link previews can also now use
Material Design for an improved user experience.
Once the product is built and launched,
DevOps teams need a way to efficiently monitor
incidents or outages and resolve them quickly.
The desk booking team is using the PagerDuty Chat app
to do just that.
The desk booking app the team has built
is seeing a small outage.
The team is instantly notified in the team
space of the outage.
And Shirley, who is the team's incident commander,
is able to quickly take action and enter information right
from chat using a dialogue.
Previously, dialogues could only be
launched from slash commands.
However, they can now be launched directly
from card buttons, as you saw Shirley do here,
making workflows such as entering information
even easier for both users and developers.
We're updating the card interface
with an initial set of visual improvements focused
on Google Chat apps.
And we will continue adding more visual improvements
over the next few months, such as the ability
to layout across multiple columns,
as you can see in the middle image, and new functionality,
including new type of widgets, such as the carousel widget you
see on the right.
Finally, we plan to make these improvements
available to Google Workspace add-ons in other Workspace
services, such as Gmail and Calendar, at a later date,
providing developers a unified set of UI elements
they can use across Workspace.
Please join our Developer Preview program today
to start testing out and providing feedback
on these improvements before they are generally available.
Next, let's talk about new Chat API capabilities.
With Chat API, developers can go beyond the concept of chat bots
to more powerful Chat apps, where
an integration with Google Chat will have access
to a powerful set of new API methods.
We're starting with two methods that are accessible
now via our Developer Preview program, CreateSpace
and CreateMembership.
CreateSpace allows Google Chat developers
to be able to programmatically create spaces
on behalf of users once the user provides authorization.
As an example, here, you can see the PagerDuty app has,
on behalf of a user who has already provided the app
authorization to do so, created a new space to discuss
and respond to an incident.
CreateMembership allows app developers
to programmatically add users to spaces,
similar to how a user can already
add other users to a space.
As you can see on the right that the PagerDuty app has
programmatically added the right users to the newly
created incident response space, allowing the team
to better collaborate and resolve the incident together.
We are starting with these two new methods for the Google Chat
API.
But we will continue adding further capabilities,
allowing developers to extend Google Chat in even more
useful ways.
Note that these capabilities will require
human authorization to use.
Please join our Developer Preview program
to try out CreateSpace and CreateMembership
and learn about upcoming API capabilities
as soon as they're available.
We hope you are as excited as we are
with this quick overview of what Google Chat can offer
for developers, including our existing features,
as well as the new card interface
improvements and new Google Chat API capabilities.
Both of these are available in Developer Preview.
And you can sign up today at the link provided.
We hope you will try out these new features
and use them to bring even more workflows to Google Chat,
allowing your users to accomplish their work even more
easily.
After you try them out, we would also
love your feedback on all of the developer
functionality of Google Chat.
So please join the developer preview program.
So we can continue improving the platform based on your input.
Don't forget to explore the multiple different DevOps
integrations that are already available in Google Chat, some
of which we saw today, to inspire your ideas
and improve your own DevOps workflows.
You can add them to a space by @ mentioning them, for instance,
@Asana, @Jira, or @PagerDuty.
Thank you again for your time.
And we hope to hear about all the ways you
are improving your users' workflows by developing
on Google Chat.
Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]