Google's "Allo" messaging app will try to read your mind

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.

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 playwright Alan 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.