Google is announcing a new messaging app today. It’s called Allo and its main feature is a Google assistant that’s built right in. Google says it’ll be available later this summer — for free — on both iOS and Android.
The intelligence of knowing what the content of the photo was in one of the examples was very smart, but I wasn’t blown away by the rest.
At this point, making sure the app has base functionality is something google needs to do. Hangouts was/is unreliable for so long for a lot of people. (I’d sometimes not get notifications for messages, or messages would fail to deliver.)
So if Allo can deliver messages and you get notified of them, it’s already a step up from before. Then at least they’re trying to compete on a level field.
There’s major privacy concerns about the app/service: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/dont-use-google-allo
But of course. It’s Google.
How many messaging apps does Google need? They’ve got the AOSP Messaging app, the newer non-AOSP Messenger, Hangouts, and now Allo? Come on, Google, this is like Apple having 4 concurrent versions of iTunes.
The importance isn’t in the capabilities demonstrated. The importance is that the evolution of the services proceeds at a pace while the illusion is that others stand idle.