Article written by Global World Technology

The mobile messaging market is a huge one. The market is dominated by apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage. These systems have several hundred million users each and growing. Even the smaller players like Viber, WeChat etc. have over a hundred million users. Into this market comes Google’s latest entrant, Allo.

By some counts, this is Google’s fifth messaging app If you take Google Talk, Hangouts, Duo and Messenger into account. It is also entering a market where the incumbents have all the benefits of network effects.

The differentiator for Google is that it has baked the Google Assistant into Allo. Google Assistant is their machine learning powered chatbot that you can talk to just like another person. It can provide reminders, news, weather and other facts you want. You can even play simple word and puzzle games with it. Google Assistant looks to be the future of Google Now, which provided context aware cards with information before you asked for it. It will also power the soon to be released Google Home device.

In actual use, Allo is very much like WhatsApp with some additional features like Google Assistant, Stickers and text modify built in. The text modifiers allow you to make text smaller (whisper) or larger (shouting) when you send it.

Google Assistant is quite capable and is useful but is unlikely to be what makes people switch. Although Allo works very well, looks good, it has nothing that will get other users to move from any of the other services. Time will tell if Google can make a dent in the market.