Google is still betting on the success of its latest chat app & it wants to prove it by adding a companion bot to Assistant, which can already be accessed from Allo & allows you to ask any question in a conversation.
‘Lucky’, which can also be invoked in any Allo chat by typing @Lucky, followed by a search phrase, will come back at you with a related GIF & stick it in the middle of the conversation.
Allo is already at version 5 & has gotten a lot of new features added like custom themes for different conversations, ‘Smart Smiley’ emojis & support for Chrome’s smart tabs. Now with the advent of Assistant on the Pixel & the Assistant & Lucky bots on Allo, Google is betting heavily on bringing Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the picture.
Lucky’s lone function is to find animated images in the middle of a chat. The bot is currently being slowly rolled out to Allo users & should be available to everyone pretty soon.
The ‘Lucky’ moniker brings to mind the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ function in Google’s main search page. An example that’s cited is that if you type the following in an Allo conversation: “@Lucky I love you”, you & your chat mate will be greeted with a bevy of animated hearts, or type “@Lucky Hello” & the bot will give you a GIF of someone waving.
Like the Google Assistant app on Google’s flagship Pixel phone & on the Google Home smart speaker, Allo is likely poised to get even more AI goodies in the future. This is likely to be the case if Assistant’s list of features are any indication of what we should expect: It can tell jokes, search the web, access your calendar…
The GIFs that you get when Lucky is invoked appear to be randomly selected by a Google search, so you’re likely to be surprised more often than not. Facebook Messenger & other chat programs like WhatsApp, limit you to choosing something specific, or to copy & paste from another app.
An alternative, & some say easier way, of searching for GIFs is through Gboard, which was formerly known as Google Keyboard. The Gboard app can replace your native Android keyboard & lets you find appropriate GIFs & emojis & that way include them into any other app.
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