BackWhy is Google making so many messaging apps?
Will Spaces, Allo and Duo prove to be the holy trinity for Google, after a decade of trying but not exactly taking the competition to Facebook?
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As if the communication and messaging apps ecosystem wasn’t already bursting at its seams, Google has added three more—Spaces, Allo and Duo. Spaces can be downloaded on Android and iOS devices now, while Allo and Duo will be “available this summer". But wait, what’s so different with Allo, in a world that has Whatsapp, Facebook’s Messenger, Apple’s iMessage and not to forget, Google’s own Hangouts app?
Say Allo
Allo is essentially designed to be a smarter instant messaging app and offer features which no rival does, yet. And most of those are based on the integration of machine learning, also known as artificial intelligence. What Allo does is it pre-empts what your response to a particular message might be, with some suggestions that show up as you are about to respond. Result—this quickens up conversations. Incidentally, Google’s Inbox email app for smartphones does have this smart reply feature. If a friend shares a photo of a very cool car, the powerful algorithm working in the background will detect the contents of the image, and throw up some possible response suggestions. Then there is Google Assistant, which is always watching, and claims to be always learning. It integrates with Google’s services, and you can pretty much chat with it like you would with any friend. Check everything from the weather to sports scores, get a reply to a question or even make reservations. But that is not all. What Assistant will also do is monitor your conversations—if you want to go out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant with a friend, it’ll get involved in the chat and share a list of the best restaurants in your city, which match the cuisine you are contemplating. Then, envision a world where you can ask Assistant to also book a table for you.
While there is a lot more to go on about, this is essentially Google’s answer to the intelligence behind Facebook’s M, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. Except that it is more conversational and is embedded into chats.
A history lesson
To understand what Google’s announcements mean, we need to delve into the past for a bit. It was 12 years ago when Google decided to transition being primarily a search company, and also focus on services, eventually apps. It released Gmail, which is pretty much the undisputed leader in the email game. That also evolved, and by 2009, Gmail got Talk real-time text messaging service and Voice (in some countries) for voice chats. The smartphone operating system, Android as we know today, started to take baby steps, in a market then dominated by Nokia and Symbian, and also had a strong presence of BlackBerry.
Google Wave tried to mash together a bit of instant messaging, forums and collaboration between colleagues—it did not work, because no one really knew what it really was for. All this while, Google eyed the success of Facebook with perhaps equal amounts of awe, fascination and envy, Buzz was their meek response in 2010, and that eventually have way to Google+ some years later. This is when we saw Hangouts for the first time, the instant messenger app that is quite popular with some users—in 2013, Hangouts got the SMS handling capabilities for smartphones, and voice over internet protocol (VoIP) was added soon after—finally the complete communications package. Compared to the haphazard entities that preceded it, Hangouts seemed streamlined. And that should have been a defining moment in the evolution. But it wasn’t, which is exactly what has been proved this week.
Is more actually better?
It was around the same time last year when Google started to separate the bits that together made Google+. The biggest example was making Photos a standalone product, and it has grown rapidly since—200 million active users, according to the latest numbers by Google. But there is no guarantee that the success of Photos can be replicated again. And the reasons include Whatsapp (1 billion users and counting) and Facebook Messenger (900 million users and counting). And chances are, that’s where your friends are.
This neatly brings us to the issue of “something for everyone". Google’s latest moves seem design to make different apps for specific purposes. You need to chat with your colleagues or a group of friends, there’s Spaces. Think of it as a mashup of Facebook Groups, photo social network Pinterest and messengers such as Slack that are designed for use in offices. Allo is Google’s response to what Facebook was doing with chatbots to make Messenger smarter eventually. And it’ll just be better in every respect, compared to Hangouts. Duo, the third app, is focused on encrypted video calling. A response, if we may, to Apple’s FaceTime and even Microsoft’s Skype. Just like Hangouts existed outside Google+ to work best, so do Spaces, Allo and Duo. In fact, for Allo and Duo, you don’t even need a Google account—simply sign up using your phone number.
Future outlook
Time and again, your friends will ask you why you are urging them to switch to Allo, Spaces or Duo, from the warm and safe confines of Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger. And we cannot blame them. Facebook, when it bought Whatsapp, didn’t change a thing. Messenger ran in parallel, and that is where Facebook experimented with games etc. Google does not have the one big product around which the experimentation can be done—the way Facebook has done with Moments, Slingshot, Rooms, Paper etc.
This feels like Google experimenting, in the real world, to see which concept sticks and what doesn’t. Though these three aren’t the final product by any stretch of the imagination, and it is unlikely that all three of the new apps, as well as Hangouts and Google+ will survive in the present avatar heading into 2017. Perhaps Allo will, because the future rides on machine learning and automating even simple chats (yes, that is how lazy the human race is becoming). But we might very well see a consolidation of Duo and Hangouts (or vice versa), for example.
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