With Allo shuttered, Google has decided to focus its messaging efforts on Messages and RCS (for the time being, at least). Since Google Messages was originally meant as a simple SMS app, the company has had to do a fair bit of work to make it a true competitor against established players like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. To reach feature parity with them, Messages is testing the addition of an instantly accessible microphone button to help you communicate via voice more easily.
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Ever since the controversy arose surrounding Google training its voice recognition technology using human contractors, barely a week goes by without another company admitting to the same. While the practice doesn't come as a surprise to many familiar with the underlying technology, no company thought of clearly stating what they were doing, which is not a good idea considering rising privacy awareness among customers and regulators. Bloomberg found out that the same is true for Facebook Messenger, affecting users who turned on voice-to-text for audio messages.
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A new version of Allo is rolling out just in time for the holidays. If you're thinking about singing Christmas carols or wishing somebody a happy new year, things are going to get a little more interesting thanks to the latest update. Your audio messages will now be automatically transcribed to text, so people can decide when to listen and have some idea of what they're going to be hearing. There's also a clue that may suggest threaded conversations will be supported. We're still poking around for other changes, but let us know in the comments if you stumble across anything else.
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We've covered a lot of what Google Allo can do as a messaging application, but we haven't yet scratched the surface of one of its most interesting features: Assistant. It lives as a standalone chat, but also as a bot ready to answer any question inside your other conversations (not the Incognito ones though, as we've said before) by just mentioning @google.
Since Assistant is an evolution of Google Now / OK Google commands, and since Allo can send voice messages, there's a nifty feature you can easily deduce from the combination of the two: Assistant will interpret your voice messages in Allo. It's
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