Google Allo – First Impression

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

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.

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.

I use an app that backs up all my SMS/MMS onto Gmail (SMS Backup+). It labels them accordingly and separates them by contact. The downside is that MMS are put on a separate conversation and conversations are limited to 100 messages. But the import process puts them all neatly back onto the phone (except MMS). I don't often have to check for old emails so I don't re-import all the texts when I switch phones, the web interface suffices.

It also puts all calls as a calendar event (including length) and entry in the conversations. I find this feature very useful.

Which is why I wrote "idiot-proof". Things such as "encrypted backup" and "server side" are difficult to parse when I'm under the pressure of changing a phone. Plus, Apple has a bad enough reputation as it is (with cloud / syncing). I want my old texts to reappear magically without having to know these complicated sounding concepts. GMail does that. GText would if Google created it along similar lines.