Nile and I decided to give Google Allo a whirl, because honestly no one else will. To make things even better we let the AI do the talking because chances are it’s going to be spending a lot of its time talking to itself.
Along with Google Duo it makes up the companies two latest fractured offerings that will be loaded onto Android by default, ousting the far superior Hangouts. The main feature of Allo is the assistant who can do searches and fetch things from you right inside the app. There’s also uh, different text sizes to choose from? And stickers? I guess?
Anyway in this first one we decided that we’d do a fairly typical booty call scenario, Nile wrote as a regular human being and I replied as the AI booty.
So it turns out there’s a restaurant called Mum’s Not Home and Google had our back on that one. Thanks Google, You’re the best.
Next up we decided that I had something awful news for Nile, and he was the one that would rely solely upon the auto response.
Well that was a relief. He took it pretty good all things considered. Auto response is a little bit confrontational, but at the same time knows how to keep an even keel. Passive aggressive I guess?
Finally we decided to both just use auto response and see how things went. Initially it goes pretty good but eventually we hit a dead end.
The auto responses are the most depressing things ever, when left to their own devices. I’d be curious to see if this feature has the ability to learn from you over time to use vernacular that you’d commonly use. I look forward to the day I can say “fuck off” with a single tap. It’d save me a lot of time each year.
P.s. So it turns out I’ve spelt Nile Bijoux’s name wrong and he just found out and notified me after reading this post. I refuse to change his name in my contacts now, out of principle.