With the announcement of Google’s new communication tool Allo, Google is reclaiming its profile on the messaging apps platform.
Facebook owns WhatsApp and Messenger, Apple has Messages, and Microsoft has Skype. What separates the new messaging app Allo from all the others? That it is exclusively Google’s creation.
Previously, Google has offered messaging apps like Google Messenger and Hangouts, but Allo goes several steps further. Because artificial intelligence technologies already support numerous Google Services, with Allo, you can chat with other people while using the search engine. For example, you can buy your girlfriend Coldplay tickets while you respond to her text, “I can’t believe you forgot my birthday” to make up for the fact that you did forget her birthday.
Allo’s Smart Reply feature auto generates replies for the user by recognizing and analyzing common phrases and frequently shared pictures. The same machine-learning network that powers Google Photos is able to make this possible. It suggests answers you can simply tap instead of typing them out.
The app is powered by Google’s AI chat bot Google Assistant and Google’s Knowledge Graph.
“The new conversational interface you can use to get information from Google. You can set up a conversation with @google and ask it all sorts of questions. It’ll respond with the information you’ve come to expect from typing into a Google search box — but it’ll also engage in a bit of a conversation with you. It’ll suggest further searches, and give you ways to do things that Google can do — like book a table with OpenTable.
“And Google’s chat bot is smarter than other chat bots. It has the power of Google’s Knowledge Graph, which understands many thousands of ‘entities’ and how they relate to each other. So you can ask more complicated questions that couldn’t be resolved just by crawling the web. And if you get bored, you can ask @google to start a game like ‘guess the movie based on a string of emoji.'”