Gadgetory

hello and welcome to Google's headquarters in Mountain View California we are here once again to get an early look at some of the stuff that they are now saying at their biggest developer conference Google i/o we've got three products to talk about and the first one is actually kind of the easiest to understand it's a straightforward text messaging app and it's called a low it's tied to your phone number instead of being tied to your Google account that means that anybody with an iPhone or an Android phone can sign up and start using this to do text messaging without having to deal with the rest of Google if they don't want to it's mobile only though it'll only work on the phone that you set it up on now as a text messaging app it's pretty good it's really straightforward it's fast it lets you send messages lets you send emoji unless you send stickers it also does a few really neat things so for example if you're typing on a word and you want to scream the word you can drag your finger up on the little send icon and the word will get in big in dand you can send it or if you want to whisper a word you can drag it down it'll send a little tiny word you can send photos of course they're full bleed on the screen and you can even draw on them to annotate them which is kind of neat so all it all seems like a really straightforward text messaging app but this one is special because this one comes from Google and it does a bunch of crazy Google stuff in addition to launching this text messaging app that's got Google intelligence in it Google is also basically rebooting the way that it does intelligent assistants so you've heard of Siri you've heard of Cortana you've heard of Alexa Google's actually been their first they've had Google now and Google Voice Search since way back and it does most of the same stuff that those other intelligent assistants do they just have been really bad at branding it because you say okay Google instead of talking to a name so the bad news is they're not giving it a name yet but the good news is is they are putting it inside of this chat app and into also a living room device eventually - so inside of a low when you want to you can just talk to Google as one of your contacts and you can ask it questions and you can have a conversation with it so that's all pretty standard chat pod stuff we've seen it before in messenger and other apps but what's interesting about alo is that Google can join a conversation that you're having with your friend so say your friend sends you a picture of a graduation photo then you can tap an automated reply saying congratulate patience because google recognized that it was a graduation photo which is crazy and also a little bit creepy but Google promises that they're not storing the contents of our chat logs on their servers or just analyzing them and throwing them away Google participates in your conversations with your friends in other ways so for example in the demo that they showed us somebody said do you want to get Italian food and then one of the suggested replies was search for Italian food and then in the conversation it showed a restaurant that you could go to you could agree on a time and you can even book it in open table right there in the chat now the thing about the Google assistant inside alo is it's not quite as like crazy wild west as you might get on messenger or even in Skype with Microsoft or even Alexa the Amazon echo they do work with third-party developers but it's not everybody can just jump in and make stuff on this just yet Google says that's coming so if you're talking text messaging apps you probably also want to know about the data security and Google says that it encrypts on the wire for standard conversations and it doesn't store your stuff on their servers but if you want to get even more secure you can have an incognito conversation and that encrypts it on the wire and also end end so that the only people that can see your conversations are you and the person you're talking to but there's one more thing there's another standalone app it's called duo and it is probably the fastest video chat app I've ever seen so duo like alo is based on your phone number so you can use it on iOS or you can use it on Android but on Android it's actually really clever if you call somebody you open up the interface you just tap the face to call very simple and straightforward but on the receiving end they actually see a video of you live while it's ringing so they can answer the phone and just immediately jump into the conversation it's a very bare-bones interface there's not a whole lot to it but there is a whole lot under the hood so Google says they've done a ton of work to reduce the latency on the video it uses WebRTC if you want to be a nerd and it also can seamlessly switch between Wi-Fi and even relatively crappy cellular networks without dropping the connection or in a lot of cases without even stuttering the video so that's a low that's due oh and that's Google's new virtual assistant and all three of those things work really great and they work really great together but you know I don't know if it's enough hangouts Google's other messaging app has basically become kind of a punching bag it's a bit of a joke and it has nowhere near the number of users that its competitors have Messenger is almost a billion whatsapp is at a billion ten cents got tons of users and so Google's way way behind and they're going to need to get a lot of people to really really want to have Google in their conversations for this thing to take off so if you want to give it a try you should also talk to your friends because otherwise what's the point of a chat app