
Google Allo – First Impression - jandll
http://prodissues.com/2016/09/google-allo-first-impression.html
======
beefsack
The more proprietary chat platforms that arise, the more I want to see
Matrix[1] / Riot[2] succeed.

Communication networks should not be corporate controlled walled gardens.

[1]: [https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org)

[2]: [https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-
ios.html](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html)
[https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-
android.html](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html)

~~~
amelius
I'm surprised that email is not corporate controlled yet.

What did email do right that chat did wrong? Afaik, there was once a good
standard for chat.

~~~
LeoPanthera
> I'm surprised that email is not corporate controlled yet.

With the vast majority of email users using a tiny number of email providers,
it effectively is. If Gmail decides that your personal mail server is sending
spam, it becomes effectively useless.

~~~
JshWright
Yeah, but there is no denying that email "federation" works very well (which
makes sense, and it was pretty much the only major design goal). The lack of
easy federation is why there are millions of chat 'bubbles' out there.

~~~
yoz-y
Also, chat ecosystems are somewhat federated on your device. Notifications and
grouping (on iOS) and contacts integration (on Android and Windows) make it
quite easy to run multiple chat clients at the same time so people do not
bother.

The one big problem is group conversations, however.

~~~
soylentcola
Group conversation starts to suck when you have to fall back to SMS. Just from
personal use, IM-type services handle it fine but they're not always cross
platform.

Friends on iPhones use the iOS IM app but when they add someone to a group
chat who isn't on iOS, they get the messages as attachments to MMS. Android's
Messenger app handles this OK at the moment but it didn't always. And when
SMS/MMS was integrated into Hangouts, it never handled it well.

Hangouts works fine for groups messages and at least you can install that on
iOS but not everyone will want to use something else when they already use
iMessage. Allo works but unless you use Allo, you get SMS/MMS from some random
new number.

Basically, from what I gather, good group conversation support is a function
of IP-based IM services and SMS/MMS was never really meant to handle that
without workarounds and hacks. But SMS/MMS are a standard that any mobile
device can handle whereas all the third party services and apps require either
a particular OS or at least another messaging app to be installed.

Really would've loved to see a standard protocol with proper encryption and
adoption by all major platforms but that doesn't seem to work for the
Apples/Googles/Facebooks/etc of the world who would rather use Messaging as a
way to keep you on their platform. Why would you leave when it would mean you
can't keep those group chats you have with friends, family, and coworkers
you've been having for all this time?

------
mtthwmtthw
The assistant piece of Allo is not too bad at all for a first drop. I noticed
that it handled context decently between users who invoked the assistant in
their chats. If you ask about a type of takeout in a specific place, and then
the other party in the chat says "what about another type" without referring
to the place, it handles the situation. However, if the first person says
something right after the results are returned. It ignores the context.

The Google team also added the ability to not return the same response for any
given request, unless the request falls into generic search. It's not
necessary, but gives it that human kind of element, and keeps it interesting.

I didn't try any kind of logical reasoning since it seemed to be heavily
reliant on Google search, which is still keyword based to a degree. One day
this will probably change, but it's a hard problem to solve given an open
domain.

I thought I would see more direct integration with APIs as opposed to
defaulting to search. I don't think I saw any in-fact beyond what is offered
through search. EG - book me a ride with uber just goes to the search results.

I'm wondering if this team is working together with the home product. If there
is also a heavy reliance on search, I can't imagine the user experience will
be that great.

~~~
drusepth
I'm guessing the lack of APIs is due to the Assistant being in a preview
state, and that we'll see the start of a slew of them on Oct 4, when things
like Google Home are released (and are also powered by the Assistant,
according to the assistant if you ask it what Google Home is).

Right now, you can ask the assistant to turn on/off lights, call a taxi, etc,
and it just responds with "I can't do that yet."

------
pritambarhate
From the article:

> It’s like the early days of the iPhone – the skeuomorphism design helped
> users get accustomed to use it, through the icons that imitated physical
> objects. Once they got educated, more than 8 years latter, the flat design
> was introduced.

Does anybody have a link for an official proclamation from Apple confirming
this? To me it felt like an effort to bring something new and exciting as
skeuomorphism was getting boring after 6 revisions of the of the OS. I dread
that day, but I think in a few years, skeuomorphism will come back, once some
high profile designers will get bored with minimalistic flat design and will
proclaim how "amazing" skeuomorphism is.

~~~
nicky0
Jony Ive was interviewed about it at the time.

“When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people
had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical
buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive. “So there was an incredible
liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were
trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of
the way.”

From [http://www.cultofmac.com/246312/jony-ive-explains-why-he-
dec...](http://www.cultofmac.com/246312/jony-ive-explains-why-he-decided-to-
gut-skeuomorphism-out-of-ios/)

~~~
pritambarhate
Thanks for the reference.

------
wanda
I wasn't impressed until I messaged Google Assistant a photo of my tabby cat
(no text, just the photo), to which the assistant responded with search
suggestions about _tabby cats_. While not breaking new ground by any means (I
mean this and more have been done before), it's very cool to have it in my
pocket, as it were, and I'm going to keep Allo installed for now just to see
where the Google Assistant goes.

Really wish I could handle SMS messaging from within Allo so I wouldn't have
to switch between apps to talk to people. It's bad enough that my colleagues
use WhatsApp and two groups of my friends use Slack and Facebook Messenger,
respectively.

I really don't understand Duo though. It's a nice little app and also nice to
have a cross-platform alternative to FaceTime (which I've never used precisely
because the majority of my friends do not use Apple devices) but Hangouts did
video already, why not just rebuild Hangouts from scratch as Duo and Allo in
one app?

Yes, I realise this is the question that has been on everyone's lips and has
been asked many times before and after the launch of these apps. I've still
yet to see a sensible answer though.

~~~
disillusioned
I regularly show people Google Photos and shout at them DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND
HOW INCREDIBLE THIS IS? IT KNOWS WHAT "FOOD" MEANS IN BASICALLY ANY VARIATION
YOU CAN THINK OF!

My favorite "this shouldn't be possible" searches are food, flowers, sunsets,
dogs, (to which it returned a picture of my dog's BUTT in the dog door. No
face. No paws. Just a butt with tail sticking out) Christmas (to which it
returned a photo of my wife, taken in July, at Bronner's Christmas Village in
Michigan, etc.

It's completely incredible how accurate it is, and it's transformed the way I
access and use my photos. I still cannot get over how "food" can mean
literally millions of things and it will show me plates, people eating, food
on a table, food in a takeout container, individual ingredients, food being
cooked, etc. Those are all so dramatically different that the fact it's able
to return them so accurately boggles my mind.

------
stevewillows
It's a shame. I was really hoping that Allo would launch as a direct
competitor to iMessage. I know I'm not alone in this, but the ability to use
the desktop client for iMessage is the only thing keeping me with IOS.

With Android, PushBullet and the others were alright, but pale in comparison.
When Google picked up GrandCentral and dubbed it 'Voice', I thought this would
be the perfect solution. 'One number to rule them all' with SMS, an eventual
desktop client, etc --- but it left out the non-US users. We were
grandfathered in, but I have very little use for a Seattle phone number these
days.

I'm not sure why Google brought this out as another client instead of
incorporating these features into one of their existing applications.

It feels like Google is trying to reinvent the wheel by giving it corners.

~~~
soylentcola
For a while, Hangouts seemed to be going in this direction so it's
disappointing to see this move away from that. It's already got support on
mobile and desktop, works on Android, iOS, Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. When they
added SMS/MMS support and started messing with Voice integration there were
definitely some version-1 issues but it was promising.

And then they spun out SMS/MMS to Messenger and now Allo. Video calls got
duplicated in Duo. I haven't heard much of anything about Voice for a while so
who knows where that's headed. Hangouts still works fine for IM across mobile
and desktop but with the other stuff gone, duplicated, or split off, I'm back
to needing multiple apps on different platforms to deal with the variety of
messaging I've still got to use in order to contact people depending on their
platform.

~~~
wldcordeiro
The amount of messaging apps coming out of Google leads me to believe there
must be some internal strife between teams or something, like people would
rather start their own than join Hangouts because the team has some issues or
something. It just doesn't make sense that they keep creating additional ones.

------
BinaryIdiot
Trying to chat with others I find difficult. Other services that use your
number will attempt to tell others you're trying to send them a message if
they're not signed up yet. Allo? Not so much. In fact many of my techie
friends, two of which worked at Google, are not even on it and it doesn't work
with any of Google's existing chat apps. So I have to go out of my way to try
to get friends on it.

Nope. Too much friction. Gave up. The AI is okay but didn't seem much better
than, say, Google Now. So I didn't really understand why I would even use it.

Dou is kinda the same way and I really wish they would have combined them. You
could even let the AI work in the video mode and if it overheats something it
can add information.

~~~
IanCal
> Other services that use your number will attempt to tell others you're
> trying to send them a message if they're not signed up yet. Allo? Not so
> much.

Doesn't it send them a text with a link to get allo? I'm certain it sent my
wife a text like this.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Oh. Two of my friends said they got nothing so I assumed it did not. Now I
don't know what happened there. Honestly I'm torn, too, as that seems like it
would be necessary but also annoying. Sigh.

------
gambiting
Seeing as Hangouts is becoming worse and worse and worse(recent update removed
tabs on the bottom of the screen, now it's all in a single window - and I get
notifications in the corner of the screen with the full content of each
message - really awkward if I'm in a meeting. In the old version, a tab would
light up green and that was it. But the absolute worst offence is that there
is no way to go back to the old interface - google took the executive decision
to break it for everyone, so they did, I'm really pissed off about it), I
would really like to switch to a different IM. Allo would be nice, if not for
the fact that it doesn't have a desktop client. That's unacceptable.

------
billyjobob
I'm finding the auto responses suggested by Allo to be pretty creepy. They are
just close enough to what I would type to tempt me to save time by clicking on
them. But they aren't actually the words I would choose myself. Yet the
recipient thinks these words are mine. So Google is subtly modifying the very
language used by billions of people. Shades of Newspeak.

~~~
tsunamifury
You are already selecting precanned phrases in your mind most of the time,
this just visualizes it. You still can cognitively work harder to write a new
phrase, this just let's your instinctual responses come out faster.

------
piyush_soni
I see a lot of people asking why not club this feature (and Duo) into
Hangouts. I use Hangouts too, but it looks like they'd grown too complicated
for a common user who wanted to 'just' do a quick text chat or a quick video
chat. Hangouts had chat, SMS, video, phone calling and what not. While I
didn't see any problem at all with that and found that good (except the UI
that was still not good), probably it's a little daunting for some people.

I still wish what others are wishing here, that there is a unified app which
just does all these things nicely with enough simplicity.

~~~
visarga
What I find useful about Hangouts is SMS history backups. Android should
backup SMSes when moving to a new phone.

------
guruparan18
You can ask @Google assistant to set a reminder, check your emails, draft and
send email to your contacts, share your location(in group). You can summon
@Google in your group chats. So far it is certainly an interesting toy.

~~~
corndoge
You can also do all of these things with the Google app, with the exact same
inputs. I had a full conversation with Allo that I repeated verbally after
saying "Ok Google" and the results were identical.

~~~
bvm
Can you check your emails with 'OK Google'? I use my Android phone as a
satnav, and it would be really helpful on the commute to get it to read me the
at least the subject lines of my inbox, I can't seem to make it do anything
other than Google "Read my unread emails".

~~~
jclos
That's certainly my biggest disappointment so far with the Google Assistant,
even though I understand that they will improve it with time. I wish it was at
least better integrated within the Google ecosystem, so that I can interrogate
it regarding my emails, my calendar or my contacts. Why can't I reference a
friend using their google+ handle? Or ask for my next dentist appointment
that's on my calendar? Or my last amazon order receipt in my mails? Hopefully
stuff like that will come and it will make the Assistant a bit more useful and
less gimmicky.

~~~
spacehunt
"Show my next flight to Melbourne" and "show my last Deliveroo email receipt"
both are working for me.

------
namaemuta
When the AI ends up showing me a Google search, it's kind of disappointing. If
I wanted to do a Google search, I'd do it myself instead of adding the step of
asking the AI to search it for me.

------
Leynos
Having tried it out, I'm more than a little puzzled. What I don't understand
is why make this yet another new platform, instead of just adding it as a new
feature to hangouts?

All they've done is introduce friction to the onboarding process.

Unless I'm really missing something here. As the linked article says, Google
already has our contacts, and they already have a list of the people we chat
with, etc. Why not just make use of this instead of asking everyone to start
from scratch again?

------
hackaflocka
If there are any Googlers on here reading this, some free unsolicited advice
from me to you:

GMail is awesome. It made email 10 times better and easier (for me anyways) to
use.

Here's an idea: GText. Despite all the products that have come out, we still
refer to texting as, well, texting. So, mail:GMail::text:GText.

Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my
phone. And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my
old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration).

So, what I would LOVE is something like GMail for texting... i.e., GText.

\- Almost unlimited storage in the cloud so I can keep all my old texts.

\- Access to all my texts via a web browser.

\- Search through all my old texts with powerful Google Search.

\- Never lose old texts just because I changed my phone.

\- All the cool GMail features such as Labels and Filters, and colors for
labels.

~~~
hbosch
You're in luck! There is a little-known product made by Google called
Hangouts[0].

It is cross platform: iOS, Android, Web, and has native apps for Windows and
macOS. It stores your texts in the cloud forever, lets you send emojis and
images, files, lets you video chat from any platform to any platform, and
every single person with a gmail account already has it! Bonus: on Android
phones it can also send SMS and MMS, without a proxy!

Hopefully this small project will take off and eventually become bigger than
Allo.

0\. [http://hangouts.google.com](http://hangouts.google.com)

~~~
ce4
Little known? You must be kidding. It has more than 1 Billion installations
[0].

It's pre-installed on every Android Handset and is the designated successor to
Google Talk, a once great XMPP chat service which had offered real xmpp
federation until Google rebranded it to Hangouts. I really liked Google Talk
back then, Hangouts gradually made it worse and worse.

The hurdles to onboard new chat members are too big (you need a G Account,
needed a Google Plus profile at some time). While the G Account is a given on
Android phones, it's a big hurdle for adding iOS users. The process is buggy
as well: After adding an account for a friend, we often had to wait 1-2 days
to "find" the person on Hangouts and be able to add them to the group chat.

On top of that, the app is slow slow slow (the browser chat as well).

As a community moderator I had to deal with above issues constantly but we
kept using Hangouts for years... despite its shortcomings. Ultimately though,
we abandoned it and switched to Telegram. Much faster mobile Apps, super easy
onboarding for new members and a great Browser client as well (plus the
company is FOSS friendly, allows custom implementations).

The Hangouts dev team even knows about its bad reputation and the product
manager even acknowledged that at some time [0]: "P.S. Unlike what the
/r/Android subreddit says, the Hangouts team does come to work every morning
trying to make it better :)"

[0]:
[https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE](https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE)

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
The parent comment was being sarcastic.

------
ipsin
"than again", I'm going to blame Emacs...

------
jamespo
Looking forward to v2 which adds multilingual (French & German) support,
codenamed 'Allo 'Allo

