Quick Review of Google Allo

Allo is now available to download in Scotland so I gave it a quick spin.

The setup is very similar to Duo in the sense that when you first start it it asks for your phone number then asks you to take a selfie and enter your name. There is no indication that it has connected to my Google account yet it seems to be able to access my contacts and my emails, and if you look under settings it says it has connected to my Google account.

Since the easiest way to test it is to chat with the Assistant, I did just that. What's disappointing at first is that it essentially works much the same as Google Now in terms of the way you can interact with it. What it means is there are certain key questions that it recognises and will respond in a more "natural" manner but if the phrasing or the subject goes beyond what it knows you'll just get "Here are some answers from the web".

The attached screenshot also tests multi-lingual support. As you can see, programming languages don't seem to be its thing, French it's just learning, Finnish isn't even recognised. The AI certainly looks like it has much to learn still, which is an odd thing to realise when you've had a Google account for over 12 years.

In terms of real people it sees 15 of my contacts I can chat with, whereas Duo has all my contacts as "invite". Reading previous reviews and analysis I suspect this just means these people have supported Android devices you can message to without them needing to have the app installed. I may test what this means in practice later tonight.

I can see why it would make sense for it to support SMS, though this isn't a deal-breaker for me as I actually prefer to use the default messaging app for that having found flaws with integrating it with hangouts that I wasn't happy with.

Overall it's a nifty little app, but if I am to believe its marketing its best features rely on the gimmicky emojis and the resizable text. Would I replace hangouts with it? Probably not, but it is fun to play with their bot / assistant, shame you can't change its name.

Quick Review of Google Allo

Allo is now available to download in Scotland so I gave it a quick spin.

The setup is very similar to Duo in the sense that when you first start it it asks for your phone number then asks you to take a selfie and enter your name. There is no indication that it has connected to my Google account yet it seems to be able to access my contacts and my emails, and if you look under settings it says it has connected to my

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