Last month it was rumored that Google is building a new unified chat service called Babble. It was later said that internally the service is being referred to as ‘Babel’ and not Babble. Now there’s an apparent confirmation of the Babel moniker from one Patric Dhawaan, who noticed the name in a pop up while cleaning his Gmail inbox. It says in the pop up that “all conversations have been moved to the Trash.” This is pretty standard, but it gets interesting after that when it reads “Because one or more are part of a Babel chat, these messages are still available in other Babel chat applications.
There’s no expected date for Babel’s release, many believe that Google will make the announcement at Google I/O. According to reports, Babel will have a new conversation based UI, ability to access same conversation list from anywhere and the ability to send pictures as well as advanced group conversations and improved notifications across multiple devices. Various signs point towards Google developing such a service. Rumor has it that Google is negotiating an acquisition of WhatsApp that might end up costing it over $1 billion. The acquisition would bring in the WhatsApp team, which is undoubtedly very well-versed with the cross platform messaging niche, and would greatly help Google in getting its own service off the ground.