After work got underway earlier this year, Google Messages is beginning to roll out @mentions in group chats.
In group chats, Google Messages will let you @mention someone to “get their attention.” The intended person will “see @mentions even if their notifications are muted.”
So far, there are a pair of reports on Reddit about this going live. You can @ in a group chat to see if a menu of contacts appears. If so, there will be a small “Try @ to get their attention” prompt.
According to people who have it, what appears after the @ symbol is the contact name as stored on your device (the Google Contacts app). You can “edit how others see this name by deleting words,” so a person’s last name can be removed from the message that everyone sees.
This is starting to appear in the Google Messages beta (version 20251103_00_RC00), but @mentions are not seeing wide availability yet.
Google in June introduced the ability to set a custom icon for group chats. In April, we also spotted work on letting people join group chats via invite links and QR codes.
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