GOOG Alphabet Inc

By Nathan Olivarez-Giles 

WhatsApp, Apple iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts: There's a good chance you're already using two or three different messaging apps just to keep up with friends and family. Alphabet Inc.'s Google wants you to try one more, Allo. And it is worth a look, even if you never text with another human: Do it to strike up a conversation with the Google Assistant, the search giant's artificial-intelligence helper.

Like Apple Inc.'s iMessage and Facebook Inc.'s Messenger -- and nearly every other messaging app out there -- Allo has plenty of fun stickers, both static and animated. Hold down on the text bubble you're about to send, and you can make text really big or really small to get your point across.

While Allo does have a special end-to-end encryption mode called Incognito -- which even lets you set a timer for automatically deleting messages -- Google does take a look at the standard chat messages on its servers. Why? To enable the Google Assistant.

While that may be a privacy concern for you, this is where Allo, which is available on both Androids and iPhones, breaks new ground. You can chat with the Google Assistant to translate a phrase, solve a math problem or even kill time playing a game. This is the same voice assistant that you have probably encountered in the search app, but now it can carry on conversations, and understand context. Well, some context.

While Facebook does offer some rather rudimentary chat bots in its Messenger app, you can't yet send a text to Apple's Siri or Amazon.com Inc.'s Alexa.

Not only that, but the Google Assistant also chimes in when you're talking to friends. It can suggest what to say next -- though it is only accurate about half the time. When a friend sent me a photo of his cat on the dash of his car, the Assistant's suggestion was "What a cute little car." (OK, maybe that was extreme cleverness.)

When my colleague Joanna Stern was remarking on how good Google's suggestions can be, the Google Assistant recommended I respond with "not really." (Wait, does this thing grasp irony?)

Those quirky examples aside, I soon started largely ignoring the suggested responses.

Google says these suggestions will improve the more people use Allo, and that it'll even be able to learn and suggest phrases commonly used by each individual user.

The assistant lived up to its name more when I chatted about getting food with friends, and it suggested nearby restaurants. But, impressive as this was, it exposed yet another shortcoming. The Assistant doesn't yet hook into third-party apps, so it is unable to book a reservation or order me some takeout. Instead, it sent me out of the app, to a website. (Not even another app.)

Asking the Assistant to show me "cute pet photos" turned up a couple of photos from a Google image search, but to share them with a friend, I had to open the images in a browser, save them and then send them in Allo. The same thing happened when trying to share a YouTube video. Though I mainly tested using an iPhone, I had similar experiences with Allo on Google's own Android mobile OS -- the app launches simultaneously on both platforms.

Even though you can't yet chat up Siri on an iPhone, Apple's Messages app in iOS 10 lets you book a reservation, watch a movie trailer and even buy movie tickets, without ever leaving your chat.

By comparison, the Google Assistant ended up not feeling particularly helpful. Google says the Assistant is still in preview mode, and that third-party app integration is on the way, as is an eventual desktop version of Allo.

But, annoyingly, Allo requires you to log into the app with your phone number, not your Google account. This means that you're building your list of friends all over again, rather than carrying over buddies from Google Hangouts. (Hangouts isn't disappearing, but Google says the focus of the text-and-video service will shift further toward business uses.)

So far, what the Google Assistant is best at -- and therefore the best reason to use Allo -- is what Google itself is known for: search. Ask for a nearby dry cleaner, a sports score, the weather forecast or a recipe -- and you'll get reliable results every time.

The Google Assistant's lack of strong abilities makes Allo an early-adopter curiosity that is fun to explore, but still miles from useful. Without much more than novelty to offer at this point, convincing your friends to use Allo will be a hard sell, especially since, to even get hold of them, you'll have to use iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger...or Google Hangouts.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 21, 2016 00:15 ET (04:15 GMT)

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