Google wants to bridge the gap between home use and productivity, and email has a foot in both worlds. To that end, you can now enable Google Chat in your Gmail account on both PCs and Android devices. (iOS will have to wait a bit longer.)

Google Chat offers similar functionality to the already available Hangouts, but the new interface is a bit cleaner and offers more productivity tools.

This information comes from 9to5Google, which found the feature available and provided instructions on how to enable it on different platforms. Google Chat itself is a real-time, Hangout-like service that allows other Google service that allows users to exchange messages with other Google users in real time, much like Hangouts.

Unlike Hangouts, however, Chat allows users to easily set up channels, converse with multiple users, and share files, especially from other Google services. Google Chat is available on Chrome as a separate tab and on Android as a separate While still available as a client, these new updates incorporate chat directly into the Gmail interface.

In any case, the chat functionality is very simple. Here is how to turn on chat.

While it is not difficult to enable Google Chat on Android, it is very easy to enable it in the browser: just go to [20] and find the "Chat" option.

By default, chat is set to "off". Select "Google Chat" instead and click "Save Changes." You are now done. Now go back to Gmail and try it out.

If you want to integrate Google Chat with Gmail on Android, you will have to jump through a few additional hoops. But the whole process is not that difficult. First, make sure you have the latest version of the Gmail app. If it is not the latest version, you can update the app in the Play Store.

Then go to Gmail's settings menu and scroll down until you see the "Chat (Early Access)" option under the "General" heading. Click on "Try it out" and follow the prompts. If chat is not to your liking, you can turn it off at any time using the same method.

Enterprise users have already been accessing the Google Chat feature for some time and the program seems to be running smoothly enough. We shall see if chat sticks around for the long term or goes the way of many other Google productivity projects.