we Tested the new chat application from Google, where he debuted his new assistant
Google today released Allo, its new instant messenger. Presented in may last, but it is now available for Android and for iPhone (in our country will be enabled to download during the day). And is the partner of the Duo, the implementation of video calls which is available from August. What I was testing last week; it works well, but is still more a laboratory than a product. Here go my impressions in detail.
What is Allo
Allo is a conventional instant messenger, and could be considered a successor of Hangouts, but more modern: it is 100% mobile. You do not have, for now, version of desktop, Web client, etc., nor does it work on tablets. Anyone who has ever used a messenger in the last five years will understand instantly how to use it, because it is equal to the rest.
The list of contacts is created based on phone numbers users have in their contacts. You don’t have to remember a user name; if two people have the other (with his cell phone number) between your contacts, will identify the match and the name of the user appears in the list of partners is available; if not, will send you an SMS with a download link. In theory, in Android it is possible to send to that contact that it is not yet a user of Allo a message interactive that appears as a notification, but it didn’t work in the version that I tried.
What brings Allo
The same as any other chat client: you can write text, add stickers, share photos and intervenirlas with a scribble or an emoji, to send audio messages. The messages have confirmation of delivery and reading (one or two tildes), and they are encrypted; it is even possible to see the exact time in which it was read, touching the balloon with the text. You can change the size of the font of the text that is to be send: by pressing and holding the send button, and then sliding the finger.
it Also allows you to create a conversation passing (incognito mode): after a period of time will be deleted and there shall be no record of any of it.
This, incidentally, is not the case with chat rooms-conventional, that are as the history of the phone and the servers of Google, which analyzes it to feed their artificial intelligence, until the user chooses to delete them manually (and unlike Whatsapp, a court order may have access to them if the user has not blotted out).
Allo also has suggestions for quick answers or common, with buttons that appear in the chat to choose a phrase that we use usually, a emoji, and so on.
what is Not to bring all the messengers?
In effect. In regards to the chat, for now Allo does not have any fundamental difference with other services that are more established, and it is the biggest challenge for Google: get someone to choose this tool over Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger, to name just the two most popular alternatives. It is not clear how they will be achieved.
Google Assistant, the differential Allo
But: what is not different? In practice it has an extra function, that is what is new… up to a certain point. Allo integrates Google Assistant, the successor of Google Now. And it is possible to engage in a conversation with him (or her) within the messenger. Does this sound familiar? Clear: is a chatbot. Facebook Messenger will also have (though not unified under a single user universal), Microsoft, Telegram has them… Even there are several national companies that are developing robots chat.
In this case, Assistant (for now works only in English) proposes an interface conversational to provide content to the user, and the attractiveness is that it allows you to do so in natural language, something that you are also testing its competitors.
that Is to say, there is not to learn a series of commands to a query, but the system is intelligent to the point of understanding the context alluded to in a question (Viv, the wizard of the company that made the original version of Siri, is going the same way).
For example: I asked “is it going to rain the weekend in Mar del Plata?” and I said no (but it will be cool, 13°C maximum on Saturday). Nothing very impressive. But then I asked him, simply: “what about Monday?” and was able to understand the query related to the same topic as the previous one (19°C and sunny). It seems obvious, but to a computer it is not; not long ago I would have had to repeat the whole query, but by changing the date.
A wizard is always on hand
A great advantage is that this digital assistant can be incorporated in another conversation, invoking a @google and then entering the query (in English for now), so that the information you bring will be visible to all the members of that conversation.
Google Assistant can do much more: to recommend places to eat, watch the news, to receive assistance during a trip (notices of where to exit a aircraft, schedules, etc.), set an alarm, offer simple games, and more. Isn’t it the same thing that you can do with Google Now? In part, yes; the change here is in being able to do it as a chat room, and that the request for more information (or do a complex query that involves mixing a specific service, a place, a date, a partner, etc.) is understandable by the system.
For now, however, is faced with the same problem that other digital assistants: sometimes writing a series of commands is what is best; sometimes, however, the graphical interface (open an app and touch a button to receive information) is fastest, or easiest to write the query, especially because the artificial intelligence of Google Assistant still has its limits.
In the future, the stakes of this wizard (use within Allo, or with the classic interface associated with a query in Google) is that you can make a query either in natural language, by text or by voice, and the system understands what is required and respond, either by text (like a chat) or through voice; there is quite significant the last publication of the Deep Mind (the enterprise of artificial intelligence Google) on their achievements with WaveNet, a technology to change how it is synthesized to the audio to make text-to-speech and get the response read more natural, even when the system has to build sentences or use words that do not had previously recorded.
does it Work Allo? Yes. It is stable, is easy to use and has everything offered by the other messengers. And integrates the wizard to the conversation, a very interesting function, although that is still only in English removes local appeal are Reached with that, and with be, in the future, the main application of Google chat? Difficult to say, but it will depend on how aggressive is the company at the time of suggest to the users that Allo is better than Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Line, Viber, and so on (and taking advantage of Hangouts will make a transition to a future corporate, he told a Google executive to Engadget), and now the only thing really different is Assistant; and even if it is in Spanish, it is not clear that it is a point so strong as to achieve mass adoption of this new instant messenger.
No comments:
Post a Comment