Google Allo - Smart messaging app that helps you say more and do more.

@mchang Congratulations ! It would be great if you could open up API to business to directly chat with customers when they ask GA about a product. http://imgur.com/a/wZYnU

@mchang Let me know when it's in the UK. Building a bot based startup and super interested.

@mchang Been playing around playing around for a few hours. So far so good. Getting great results from Assistant and good smart predictions too. I did get a random "action_result" result while talking to the assistant, though. Not too interested about SMS support. Haven't sent an SMS in yearrrs. Probably the biggest thing on my wish-list is a web app. I don't like typing slowly on a mobile when I'm sat at my laptop, so I can see myself changing between Allo and other apps depending if I'm at my laptop or not (and possibly the recipient of the message doing the same if they are at their laptop). Second is adding someone by QR, ID, or email. Some people want to chat but don't want to give out their number. Congrats on the release.

@mchang This looks great. Are you planning to build GIF's into the app? if not you should build, they are fun.

@vthallam It supports GIFs if you have them on your phone or use a keyboard that can search them. But yes, would be good if the app could search GIFs too :)

@slobatch backwards compatibility tends to hamper product innovation and force lowest common denominator design. Most of the features of Allo don't translate back to text-only well. How would you do stickers? Expensive MMS? Read receipts? Not possible. Allo is for users with data or who are on Wi-Fi. It's about the next 10 years of messaging, not the past... at least as far as I would attempt to understand their strategy.

@chrismessina I hear that. I think we will see people continue to move away from SMS over time, but I think claiming that focusing on SMS would hamper product development is a bit of a cop out for two reasons: 1. When you're entering a market with so many competitors this late, you must account for network effects. How do you achieve critical mass when everyone's already got their favorite messenger? You know what else hampers innovation? A lack of traction. A lowest common denominator is a boon in this scenario, especially had Google positioned Allow as "Android's iMessage," and then given it AI superpowers. 2. There isn't a single feature of Allo that is wholly incompatible with SMS fallback. Stickers? Yeah, send them as SMS. Google's "Messenger," which is solely for SMS has exactly that functionality. Read receipts? Don't offer them for SMS messages. Frankly, all these issues are already addressed relatively well by iMessage or even by Facebook Messenger, which can be set as a default messaging application on Android. Heck, even Hangouts has attempted (albeit clumsily) to address these issues. I get that any company wants to move away from the ugly stepchild that is SMS (and even uglier, MMS) and focus their efforts on the future, but you're not going to do it without a strong user base and a strong foundation. Maybe future releases will reveal that Google plans to make Allo the messenger they referred to in their Jibe/RCS update email. Maybe everything I think will be proven wrong. Right now, I'm pretty skeptical.

@slobatch I constantly see this critique of Allo around the web and I find it astonishing, mostly because most Americans don't seem to be aware of the fact that SMS incurs it's own individual charge per message in many countries, for instance in my current country of residence (Barbados) each text amounts to $0.20, which you can imagine adds up pretty quickly. This alone is what made Whatsapp the leading messaging client here after the Blackberry and BBM boom died. Thus if messages defaulted to sending an SMS without a connection it would inconvenience most users. Frankly I like what Google appears to be doing, which is sending an SMS from a proxy number when a contact doesn't have Allo installed or sending a notification via play services, it seems like a better decision rather than continuously clinging to the inferior SMS, which was supposed to be "Killed off" by these messaging apps in the first place

@alexzibrit admittedly, I am biased as an American user of messaging services, and SMS has been largely unlimited here for years now. It may very well even be that I'm not Google's intended market with this play. Genuinely curious, do you expect your contacts will switch over to Allo to chat with you, or do you expect most of them to continue using WhatsApp? (Sorry if that sounds combative, I actually want to hear how you think things will go.)

@slobatch . Google is a major player in RCS, the next update to SMS that should be adopted by all carriers. This should play some part in their decision

@rrhoover what would be your bet on Allo?

@rrhoover @backlon The app preview notification on Android is very interesting. Probably laying foundation for Instant Apps. "If they’re on an Android phone, something new and intriguing happens. Google is calling it an "app preview notification," and basically it shoots a notification directly to your Android device instead of going through SMS. Your friend will get a notification that looks and acts almost as if they had the app installed in the first place, message content and all. It means they won’t incur any SMS fees, either. Your recipient can reply within the notification, or tap on it to install the app."

@sarthakgh @rrhoover @backlon Yes! That's great. A friend pinged me and i had no idea that i have Allo. It showed me an option for instant reply or download. This will definitely help in user acquisition too.

@rrhoover @backlon makes me wonder if Allo launch is why we don't see GBoard for Android yet :)

@jellychip They want Hangouts to be for enterprise users.

@jellychip Hangouts has been struggling with a userbase, and some of this technology is easier to build from the ground up than add to an old product

@werewookiee @jellychip That's understandable that it's struggling, but not too focus on improving it when it has an established base is not going to win a lot of new people for Allo. This product doesn't bode well with Google's product support track record. Honestly Allo will be a niche product in a sea of messaging apps.

@jellychip I too just don't really get it. It's not like FB Messenger has multiple apps for chat. So now there is Hangouts, Allo and Duo from Google. I use Hangouts quite a bit from desktop in gmail and on the phone...but now I have to use multiple apps and possibly message people in multiple places, or am I missing something? They should have just boosted Hangouts with all the functionality to compete with others like Messenger. Plus Hangouts (at least did) allow to either SMS or Hangout somebody, I loved that for the people that didn't have hangouts...keeping it all in one app.

@callmedpit Yeah, I really don’t see what’s being done here that couldn’t have been done in a Hangouts revamp. Maybe there’s too much legacy stuff in there, since Hangouts was built on top of Google Talk?

@_jdkanani yes we have smart replies for Hinglish..... will develop for more languages in the coming months..

@amitfulay Kannada and Tamil would be awesome. Sundar Pichai would appreciate the inclusion of Tamil ;)

@madhu_ 😄

@amitfulay @madhu_ It has been working flawlessly (at least when it does) for Marathi. Maybe it is just a fluke or Machine Learning or whatever else but it does prompt me with Marathi words which are accurate responses for the context. Of course, written in Roman script, Maringlish or Minglish? Maybe 😜

@nbrempel You're always welcome down-south.

@msitver I come down pretty often :D. Don't think I can give up Vancouver Island for long though

@nbrempel yay! the Island!

@tomaswilliamsa 🌲

@androidlove Wait like you can only be logged into one device at a time? No desktop is a non-starter for me already.

@guyshimoni I'm in Israel and I was able to download it. But my wife - on the same wifi connection, same type of device, same carrier (Golan) - could not get it. So I'm not sure what their deal is.

@avizuber Is your device connected to the U.S Appstore?

@guyshimoni Yeah, maybe. It's a device I had in the US and made Aliyah with it.

Maybe she was on the wrong page or she is young for it

Yes mine is but sometimes it can not be connected bc of the wifi or something like that if you have trouble talk to me ik alot about it

@rrhoover @mchang @amitfulay I loved "What is your ancestry?"

@rrhoover @mchang @amitfulay ask "what is love"

Same xx

@dickyinjava grabbed the iOS version here https://allo.google.com/ (scroll down on the post)

@ssieg yep works now, but strangely, when I search for allo in app store, it did not show up before...