Google has rejoined the messaging wars with its artificially intelligent app, Allo

Google is ready to leap back into messaging.

Allo, the standalone messaging app that Google announced back in May, is now available to the masses — and most likely smarter than any messaging app you’ve ever used.

Allo comes with Google’s AI assistant and search functionality baked in, which means it offers a handful of perks that other apps don’t have. It will automatically suggest replies for you to send based on your conversation. If you’re making dinner plans with a friend, it will surface nearby restaurants. You can ask it for movie times or directions or the score of the game.

“One of the principles we’ve applied here is not to have lots and lots of clutter,” explained Nick Fox, VP of Google’s communications products. “We don’t want people to be having to dig through the app to find the thing they want. We want to surface the right things at the right time.”

All of this “surfacing” happens within an otherwise typical messaging conversation, which is the key here because most people are already having these kinds of conversations inwards of other companies’ apps. The artificially intelligent assistant is Google’s differentiator in its quest to capture some of the consumer messaging market from incumbents like Apple (iMessage) and Facebook (WhatsApp and Messenger), both of which have a massive head begin.

No surprise, but Fox says he isn’t stressing about Google’s late begin.

“While messaging has been around for a while, wise messaging is much newer,” said Fox. “I do think this is a fresh era where we have a lot of advantages building on top of a lot of these investments we’ve been making around machine intelligence.”

That may eventually be the case, tho’ Google has never been able to crack messaging or social media in the past. Its Facebook killer, Google+, has fallen off the map. Its native Android messaging app is just texting, and Google now says that it considers Hangouts (formerly Gchat) to be an enterprise messaging client for things like inter-office communication.

Which brings us back to Allo. Coupled with Duo, the company’s fresh movie talk app, Allo represents the tech giant’s foray back into mobile communication.

We tested the app over the past twenty four hours and found it to be relatively useful. For the most part, the assistant felt more helpful than invasive, tho’ that could lightly switch when the conversation switches from where to meet for lunch to something more serious and private. Google does suggest an “incognito” messaging mode for end-to-end encrypted messages. Google’s AI assistant won’t chime in on those message threads.

One other critique: While we didn’t need to go hunting for things inwards the app, adding the Google search results to the messaging thread does seem to clutter it up a bit. At times it was rough to tell which messages were sent by a human and which were Google-generated.

Still, Google Allo offers something we haven’t seen before in a messaging app. A nice perk is that you should be able to use Allo to message people even if they don’t have the app. Messages to those without Allo are simply sent as texts.

Allo is available beginning Wednesday for free on both iOS and Android.

Google has rejoined the messaging wars with its artificially intelligent app, Allo

Google has rejoined the messaging wars with its artificially intelligent app, Allo

Google is ready to hop back into messaging.

Allo, the standalone messaging app that Google announced back in May, is now available to the masses — and most likely smarter than any messaging app you’ve ever used.

Allo comes with Google’s AI assistant and search functionality baked in, which means it offers a handful of perks that other apps don’t have. It will automatically suggest replies for you to send based on your conversation. If you’re making dinner plans with a friend, it will surface nearby restaurants. You can ask it for movie times or directions or the score of the game.

“One of the principles we’ve applied here is not to have lots and lots of clutter,” explained Nick Fox, VP of Google’s communications products. “We don’t want people to be having to dig through the app to find the thing they want. We want to surface the right things at the right time.”

All of this “surfacing” happens within an otherwise typical messaging conversation, which is the key here because most people are already having these kinds of conversations inwards of other companies’ apps. The artificially intelligent assistant is Google’s differentiator in its quest to capture some of the consumer messaging market from incumbents like Apple (iMessage) and Facebook (WhatsApp and Messenger), both of which have a massive head begin.

No surprise, but Fox says he isn’t stressing about Google’s late commence.

“While messaging has been around for a while, clever messaging is much newer,” said Fox. “I do think this is a fresh era where we have a lot of advantages building on top of a lot of these investments we’ve been making around machine intelligence.”

That may eventually be the case, tho’ Google has never been able to crack messaging or social media in the past. Its Facebook killer, Google+, has fallen off the map. Its native Android messaging app is just texting, and Google now says that it considers Hangouts (formerly Gchat) to be an enterprise messaging client for things like inter-office communication.

Which brings us back to Allo. Coupled with Duo, the company’s fresh movie talk app, Allo represents the tech giant’s foray back into mobile communication.

We tested the app over the past twenty four hours and found it to be relatively useful. For the most part, the assistant felt more helpful than invasive, tho’ that could lightly switch when the conversation switches from where to meet for lunch to something more serious and private. Google does suggest an “incognito” messaging mode for end-to-end encrypted messages. Google’s AI assistant won’t chime in on those message threads.

One other critique: While we didn’t need to go hunting for things inwards the app, adding the Google search results to the messaging thread does seem to clutter it up a bit. At times it was raunchy to tell which messages were sent by a human and which were Google-generated.

Still, Google Allo offers something we haven’t seen before in a messaging app. A nice perk is that you should be able to use Allo to message people even if they don’t have the app. Messages to those without Allo are simply sent as texts.

Allo is available beginning Wednesday for free on both iOS and Android.

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