Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is why you should run your own mail server. Email, along with the web, is the last part of the decentralised internet to exist. Don't let it die.
Google Allo – First Impression
51–60 of 102 posts
Re: Google Allo – First Impression
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why you should run your own mail server. Email, along with the web, is the last part of the decentralised internet to exist. Don't let it die.
Are there email servers aimed at Linux noobs?
Re: Google Allo – First Impression
#53The 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…
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."
Re: Google Allo – First Impression
#54The 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 [2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html
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.
Any federated/distributed chat system would have to deal with spam and abuse upfront in its design, or people would just migrate back towards controlled systems without those problems.
There's a second issue of where the chat continuity should be kept across devices, which favours hosted systems.
(There's no fundamental reason why you couldn't build an SMTP-based chat system by imposing convention on top of the protocol, favouring short messages with no Subject header. It's just that, as implemented, email is a little too slow.)
Re: Google Allo – First Impression
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why you should run your own mail server. Email, along with the web, is the last part of the decentralised internet to exist. Don't let it die.
Are there email servers aimed at Linux noobs?
I mean, you can get a hosted VM and install Exim and Dovecot and drop in your domain name in the right places, but there are a lot of little things you have to deal with in order to get your mail to other people and others' mail to you without getting drowned in spam. Then you're fundamentally responsible for it and it can break while you're on holiday.
I used to do this, and still hang on to my own mail domain that I've had for 16 years, but I pay for it to be hosted now on a small provider.
Re: Google Allo – First Impression
#56Re: Google Allo – First Impression
#57If 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 p…
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,…
Re: Google Allo – First Impression
#58I 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 wi…
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.
Re: Google Allo – First Impression
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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".
Re: Google Allo – First Impression
#60I still wish what others are wishing here, that there is a unified app which just does all these things nicely with enough simplicity.