According to Google, “As some teams begin to return to office, while others remain distributed, we hope this makes it easier to connect with your colleagues in the hybrid work world. This feature will allow you to seamlessly switch between chat to a video or audio call when needed, helping you collaborate and move your work forward.”
As it stands, Google already allows Gmail users on the web to start meetings with Google Meet and chat with other users using Hangouts within the Gmail interface, so it hardly comes as a surprise that a similar feature would now make its way into its app. This will be available for both iOS and Android apps so users should be able to look forward to it in the near future.
Keep in mind that at the moment, Google says that this feature will only work for 1:1 on sessions, so if you wanted to host group meetings or calls, you’d have to use a different dedicated app for it, but in a pinch, this will work just fine.