Google's New Allo and Duo apps

Allo and Duo apps

Both these apps are individual chatting apps, which makes us wonder why Google did not integrate the two.

However, Allo is just a simple text chatting app while Duo is a video-calling app. Allo employs Google Assistant to chat with friends and suggesting smart replies. By smart we mean intuitive replies and make it unnecessary to type anything unless important.

The app is linked to a user’s phone number and will make suggestions to the user as the conversation advances. The AI working at the back recognizes the sentences written and suggest responses to the words and images transferred.

Allo has an interesting feature that increases the size of your words written to express ‘Shouting’ and ‘Whispering’ to the other person. Emojis are also automatically suggested depending on the sentence written, which means the app constantly monitors your chats.

Duo is a video-chatting service like Apple’s FaceTime and that’s pretty much it. There is only one feature that sets it apart from other similar services, which is Knock Knock. What it essentially does is that before the other person accepts your video call, he/she will get a live preview of you and your background from your smartphone’s camera.

This could be used in some interesting ways but can be a big pain during important meetings and conferences. Both the apps will be available for iOS and Android soon and Google ensures they will be end-to-end encrypted for security.

Our verdict – The idea of Google always monitoring your chats to predict messages is a bit creepy, and to add to the creepiness, Duo will have a live preview from your smartphone’s camera. Setting that aside, it is quite disappointing to see a half-baked product from Google.

It is almost like Duo was released to counter FaceTime. Allo and Duo could have been integrated into one app by replacing Google Hangouts. Also, we don’t know the fate of Google Hangouts, considering there are two applications in place of one.

What we do like is the fact that messages will be intuitive for the smartphone so you technically don’t need to bother with typing while engrossed in something else.