Now in Developer Preview: Create Spaces and Add Members with the Google Chat API

May 09, 2022


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Posted by Mike Rhemtulla, Product Manager & Charles Maxson, Developer Advocate

The Google Chat API updates are in developer preview. To use the API, developers can apply for access through our Google Workspace Developer Preview Program.

In Google Chat, Spaces serve as a central place for team collaboration—instead of starting an email chain or scheduling a meeting, teams can move conversations and collaboration into a space, giving everybody the ability to stay connected, reference team or project info and revisit work asynchronously.

Programmatically create and populate Google Chat spaces

We are pleased to announce that you can programmatically create new Spaces and add members on behalf of users, through the Google Workspace Developer Preview Program via the Google Chat API.

These latest additions to the Chat API unlock some sought after scenarios for developers looking to add new dimensions to how they can leverage Chat. For example, organizations that need to create Spaces based on various business needs will now be able to do so programmatically. This will open up the door for Chat solutions that can build out Spaces modeled to represent new teams, projects, working groups, or whatever the specific use case may be that can benefit from automatically creating new Spaces.

Coming soon, example from an early developer preview partner

One of our developer preview partners, PagerDuty, is already leveraging the API as part of their upcoming release of PagerDuty for Google Chat. The app will allow users of their incident management solution to take quick actions around an incident with the right team members needed. PagerDuty for Chat will allow the incident team to isolate and focus on the problem at hand without being distracted by having to set up a new space, or further distract any folks in the current space who aren’t a part of the resolution team for a specific incident. All of this will be done seamlessly through PagerDuty for Chat as part of the natural flow of working with Google Chat.

Example of how a Chat app with the new APIs can enable users to easily create new Spaces and add members to an incident.

Learn more and get started

As you can imagine, there are many use cases that show off the potential of what you can build with the Chat API and the new Create methods. Whether it’s creating Spaces with specified members or extending Chat apps that spawn off new collaboration Spaces for use with help desk, HR, sales, customer support or any endless number of scenarios, we encourage you to explore what you can do today.

How to get started: