- DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.18.16.05.18.16
- TIME OF PUBLICATION: 1:32 PM.1:32 PM
GOOGLE’S NEW ALLO MESSAGING APP
GETS ITS EDGE FROM AI
APPLE HAS ONE.
It’s called Messages. Microsoft has
one, too. It’s called Skype. Facebook has two of them: WhatsApp and Messenger.
They’re all messaging apps—smartphone apps that let you chat with
friends and family. But they’re rapidly morphing into something else, a new
kind of super communication tool that does so much more than just shuttle texts
between people.
So, it should come as no surprise
that Google is building a new one of its own. It’s
called Allo. The big difference is that, well, it comes from Google.
Unveiled this morning at the company’s annual Google I/O
conference and due to arrive later this summer, Allo will run on both Android
Phones and the Apple iPhone, and early signs suggest it’s at least a little bit
smarter than other messaging apps, thanks to various artificial intelligence
technologies that already underpin so many other Google services. Google
already offers messaging apps like Google Messenger and Hangouts, but this goes
several steps further.
As you chat with friends and family,
Allo will automatically analyze what you’re saying and suggest quick replies so you don’t have to type out a
full response on your own. It will even analyze photos that arrive
from friends and suggest replies based on what it “sees” in these images. If
someone sends you a photo of a graduation ceremony, for instance, Allo will
offer a “congratulations” or a “well done,” and you can chose to send—or not.
But above all else, Allo is different because of the way it lets you interact
with that centerpiece of Internet life: the Google search engine.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryGoogle AlloGOOGLE
From inside Allo, Google says, you
can chat with its search engine as you chat with everyone else. While wishing
your sister a happy birthday, you can ask a Google bot to serve up an
appropriately festive photo. As you discuss the works of the playwrightAlan
Bennett with a colleague, you can ask the bot for his bio. If
you’re chatting with your old college buddies, trying to arrange a dinner, you
can ask the bot for restaurant suggestions and even make a reservation. “Where
this gets really powerful,” says Amit Fulay, the Google product manager who
oversees Allo, “is when you can bring the assistant into group conversations.”
But Google’s big idea goes farther than that. As Google
director of engineering Erik Kay describes it, the vision is to bring all sorts
of online information and services directly into your online conversations.
Rather than bring all your friends into one app and then another and then
another, he says, you can bring the apps to them, all via a Google-supplied
layer of artificial intelligence.
The Search Assistant
Chatbots are all the rage among tech
companies big and small. Microsoft and Facebook are pushing them into their own
messaging apps, and so are countless startups, from Slack to Hipchat to
GoButler. Some, like Slack, are using bots to beef up communications
among co-workers. Others, most notably Facebook, are pushing towards
bot-powered messaging services that supplant apps as the way we interact not just with people but with
businesses, from restaurants to airlines to retail stores.
In China, people already use a messaging
service called WeChat to do everything from buying movie
tickets to summoning rides to booking medical appointments. American tech
companies believe it’s only a matter of time before Americans start using their
messaging services in much the same way.
With Allo, Google is moving down the same path as Facebook.
The company says it’s partnering with OpenTable, for instance, so that you can
seamlessly make restaurant reservations via that Google bot, and it plans on
tying into other businesses as time goes on. “You can imagine us exposing hooks
where all sorts of other services can integrate,” Fulay says. “In a group chat,
you get movie tickets or get a cab.” But that’s just part of Google’s ambition.
The bot inside Allo is known, at least for the moment, as
the Google search assistant (lowercase “s,” lowercase “a”). And in Google’s
grand vision, this assistant won’t just live within Allo. Later this year,
sometime after Allo is released, the company says, it will also roll out a
device that sits in your living room and lets you chat with the Google search
assistant using your nothing but your voice. It’s called Google Home, and it’s
a bit like the Echo, a device from online retail giant Amazon. With Google
Home, the company says, you can not only interacts with the Google search
engine and other Google services, but control other devices around the house,
including TVs and stereos, thermostats and smoke detectors.Click to Open Overlay GalleryGoogle HomeGOOGLE
So, that bot inside Allo is part of an even broader movement
across the tech world, a movement towards online services that let us chat with
all sorts of machines as we chat with each other—or at least kinda like we chat
with each other. This includes not only the Amazon Echo, but smartphone
“digital assistants” like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, which also
respond to the spoken word.
Google already offers its own
digital assistant on Android phones, but now it aims to go much further by
using its latest AI technologies to build digital assistants across myriad apps
and devices. Just last week, Google open sourced the software
engine that serves as the foundation of its efforts to build
services that can understand the natural way that you and I talk. It’s based on
an ascendant form of AI called deep learning, and Allo
will show just how far this technology has come.
“The gains we’ve seen with deep learning for natural
language understanding have not been as astounding as they were for speech
recognition and computer vision,” says Noah Smith, a professor of computer
science at the University of Washington who specializes in natural language
understanding. But the field has advanced, he adds, and now, researchers at
places like Google are “trying to figure out how best to make use of them.”
Beyond Siri
If you’ve ever used Siri, you know that it doesn’t quite
live up to those television ads where Apple’s assistant behaves like some sort
of sentient being. Siri can understand simple commands like “text my mother” or
“set my alarm for 6am.” But it can’t grasp English in all its complexity. Even
if it does “understand” what you’re saying, it often can’t quite respond as it
should, just because it’s not tied into the right app or service.
But the state-of-the-art is
improving, thanks in large part to deep neural networks, networks of hardware and software
that can learn particular tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. Google and
Facebook in particular already make wide use of deep neural nets to recognize objects and faces in photos. And Microsoft
uses them to translate from one language
to another inside Skype. They recognize individual words spoken into smartphones.
And they’re beginning to improve
the ability of machines to understand natural language, to not just
recognize words but grasp how they come together to provide meaning.
Deep neural nets power the Google assistant that powers both
the Allo app and the forthcoming Google Home device. So if you speak to Home,
neural nets will work to understand your words and reply in a way that makes
sense. When you trade messages with friends over Allo, neural nets work to
understand what your friends are saying so the app can suggest meaningful
replies. Google is at the forefront of deep learning research, so there’s good
reason to expect good things from Allo. But don’t expect perfection.
Though Fulay and Kay showed me some
of what Allo could do during a recent visit to Google, they wouldn’t let me use
it on my own. And the Google Home device was nowhere to be seen. But even if
these tools do prove useful, they won’t deliver true conversations anytime
soon. The state-of-the-art just isn’t
there yet, as Google acknowledges. “We are very far from where we
want to be,” says Google research director Fernando Pereira, who helps oversee the company’s
work with natural language understanding.
But Google will keep pushing, as
will its rivals. Today, Google may have a slight advantage when it comes to AI.
But the big competitors aren’t far behind. And in some ways, they’re already
ahead. The Amazon Echo beat Google to market. Skype is already widely used.
Facebook Messenger alone is used by more than 900 million—WhatsApp by a billion. For Google, the trick lies in getting people to
adopt Allo instead. Given Google’s spotty track record with both hardware and
social networks, that will be quite a trick.
A First Step
Whether it succeeds or not, you can think of Allo and its
search assistant as a first step towards a new kind of Google. The Google
search assistant isn’t a single thing that sits inside a single app. It’s a
vast swath of online infrastructure that underpins all sorts of tools. You may
first encounter this assistant via Allo or Google Home. But Google says it
could pop in all kinds of other places, from digital watches to cars.
Wherever it shows up, the idea is to provide a new and
ostensibly more natural way of interacting with Google services, from Google
search to Google Maps to Gmail to all the little apps on your Android phone,
like the alarm to the phone dialer. And of course, the assistant will remember
you and your online history as you move from device to device. (Don’t like the
idea of Google tracking everything you do? There are small ways of limiting the
data grab. Allo, for instance, offers an “incognito mode” that hides your chats
behind end-to-end encryption so that even Google can’t read them).
Ultimately, the company is building a new set of “entry
points” for the Google universe, says Scott Huffman, a vice president of
engineering for Google Search. “We’re creating these entry points that are
purely conversational,” Huffman says. “Over time, we want you to be able to ask
for anything Google does.”
This will include not just Google
software but Google hardware. Google Home will connect to things like the Google Chromecast and Nest thermostats and smoke detectors. But the company
will also extend beyond the Google universe. Allo, the company says, will run
on iPhones as well as Androids, and through devices like the Chromecast, Google
Home will work with other connected devices around the home, including TVs and
stereos.
Google is still working through the particulars. It even
indicates that the Google search assistant will one day be called something
else (hence the lowercase “a” and the lowercase “s”). It’s unveiling this new
vision at Google I/O today because that’s where the tech world is looking, and
Google wants the world to appreciate the scope of its ambition. But it’s an
ambition that makes sense.
More than ever, computers can understand what people say.
Sometimes they can even respond. The smartest people at the smartest tech
companies are applying their formidable brainpower to figuring out how to make
these computers even smarter. Computers are a long way from the point where
they can fool us into believing they aren’t computers at all. But it’s not
unreasonable to think that they’ll eventually be able to hold up their end of a
decent conversation.
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