‘Allo’ was announced at Google’s I/O conference recently, & uses the search giant’s powerful back-end algorithms to power a new messaging environment akin to Facebook’s Messenger or WhatsApp, but with additional features like one that makes smart automated replies on your behalf or an AI powered assistant.
Allo can do things like analyze the Content of a photo that someone sends you & provide related relevant comments. By using Google’s powerful search algorithms, the app can make a reservation in a restaurant, send users up-to-date sports scores or allow them to play a game or make appointments without ever leaving the app. You can chat with the assistant within the app & it will get you driving directions from Maps, search Google, play YouTube clips & even translate your conversations.
As an example given by Google illustrates – since the app understands natural language patterns, you can just chat with the assistant & since it understands what you’re saying & knows a lot about you, you can ask “is my flight delayed?” & it will return info about your flight status.
It will even let you add photos to a conversation & let you doodle on them via its ‘Ink’ feature, or increase or decrease the size of your fonts to better express your mood (Whisper Shout).
Another feature is ‘Stickers’, which provides a bunch of professionally designed art work for stickers that you can use to better express yourself. & if you’re worried about privacy, the chats are encrypted end-to-end, & you can control how long messages stick around with expiring chats. You can even use private notifications to avoid peek-a-boo shoulder surfers. You also don’t need to use a Google account to use Allo, since it can use your phone number exclusively to ID you.
Google also announced that a complementary app, named ‘Duo’ will soon be available that will let you make video calls & comes with a ‘knock knock’ feature which shows you a live video preview of the person calling you.
Allo will be available for the Android platform during the summer on the Google Play Store & you can pre-register here. Google also announced that it will be available for Apple’s iOS platform, soon.
Image Credit: Google
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