San Francisco, June 14 : Google has announced that it is shutting its instant messaging service Google Talk on Thursday. Google Talk offered both text and voice communication. "We are winding down Google Talk. On June 16, 2022, we will end our support for third-party apps, including Pidgin and Gajim, as we announced in 2017," the company said in a blogpost. "To continue to chat with your contacts, we recommend using Google Chat. You can more easily plan with others, share and collaborate on files, and assign tasks with Chat's enhanced Spaces feature. You also have the same strong phishing protections we build in Gmail and accessibility features like screen reader support," it added. According to Android Police, Google Talk was the company's original instant messaging service initially designed for quick conversations between Gmail contacts, but it soon became bigger before being replaced by newer Google services. Google Talk became an application across Android devices as well as BlackBerry. In 2013, the company began retiring the service and switching people to its other messaging apps. At the time, Google Hangouts was the replacement messaging app. That service is now also dead, with Google Chat as the main replacement for instant messaging through your Google account, the report said. /IANS