Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App | Hacker News Reader

Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App

wsj.com

21 pointsprostoalex24 comments

"WeChat, for instance, lets users shop, pay bills and book appointments."

Does anyone have experience with it? Is it actually useful, or just a gimmick?

And I have to point out that there is a protocol which is open, supports both users and services with registration, supports federation, and supports arbitrary payloads, making it a great solution for a chat bot platform... But of course everyone dropped xmpp and now will have to reinvent it.

An excellent read about WeChat from a16z: http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/

Living in China and living the wechat platform. I pay my groceries by presenting a QR code, pay my taxi by scanning the driver's QR code, pay my utilities and to up my mobile. Really handy!

"Google is building a new mobile-messaging service that taps its artificial intelligence know-how and so-called chatbot technology to try to catch up with rivals..."

Or they could, you know, fix notifications in Android's Hangouts app.

Or, you know, bring back off the record conversations. The ability to delete individual messages/pictures out of conversations. Encrypt conversations by default, and stop requiring chrome for the desktop apps to work.

Or, you know, make video calls in HangOuts not suck.

It's hilarious because everyone in this sub-thread is correct. Its why I moved to an iPhone 6 and use iMessages and Facetime for all of my messaging/communications needs.

No fan boy, just someone who likes things to work when I need it. Its like Google doesn't care at all that the experience sucks.

The biggest problem of that is that it only works if you can assume everyone in your contact list uses iOS. How do you deal with that problem? (I'm just curious...)

Everyone in my immediate family, as well as my colleagues and my immediate friends have iPhones. Network effects I guess.

I only have two or three friends without iPhones. We simply text or call back and forth.

This -- I recently switched to Android thinking "iPhones are luxury phones. Surely a bunch of my friends use Android." Was immediately known as "Green Bubbles" guys for a few weeks by family and friends.

But even the green bubble solution is "perfect". One app. One experience. I want to message this person, through the internet for free if possible and if not - just send it as a text. I don't want 4 apps on my phone to do the same thing, and that's why I don't see the point in being an also-ran

Hah, I didn't even get "green bubbles" reference until I came back here just now :-) (I'm not an iOS user.)

Some of the downside about text is that it often shows unpredictable behavior, especially when it involves going over carrier's gateway to other networks, or involving some non-ordinary systems like Google Voice. Though, it seems to be improving now, but I used to see anything from garbled messages to complete silence, and it often exhibited different behavior between combinations of different sender and receiver. (For instance A, and B in same network might have worked OK, but A to some user in another network being able to receive, or sometimes being able to receive one way, but corrupts for the other way around, etc.)

Google Voice until recently (maybe a year ago?) or so, couldn't do any group MMS at all, and would simply get ignored. One blamed would be one who deviates from standards, but my most pet peeve of SMS/MMS is that it offers very little to no error indications when something goes wrong.

I actually manage a volunteer team of 30 or so with varying types of devices, where one to many communication is highly needed, and I find messaging solution very complicated problem to solve. (And yes, I'm likely resort to having like 2 to 3 apps to get it done...)

Oh yes, you "green bubble" people. I pretty much only talk to them on FB and if we have to talk in a group I'll use a FB group. I'm no fan of facebook but messenger blows SMS out of the water and at least brings everyone up to the same level. Just 1 sms-only user in an iMessage group and you are back to the dark ages it feels like... No offense to android users it's just a PITA to have to revert to SMS when 90% of the people in the group have iOS/iMessage.

I have yet to find a video call platform that works cross platform as well as Hangouts.

Skype has always been the gold-standard for me. Pretty tough to beat.

"Users will be able to text friends or a chatbot, which will scour the Web and other sources for information to answer a question"

So instead of typing this in google, you would send a message to a chatbot? I always found chat bots gimmicky, just like Siri. It's great as a novelty, nothing else..

Siri is only good for things like "How many X in a Y" (Like units of measurement), "Remind me to do X at Y", and "Set an alarm/times for X". Past that I've found it to be almost useless.

> So instead of typing this in google, you would send a message to a chatbot?

How is typing something in Google different than sending it to a bot, other than currently you use different input boxes to do it? To me, this sounds like just unifying the messaging and search interfaces into one DWIM interface, and isn't really surprising given how much Google has been trying to merge everything into a shared DWIM interface.

I was surprised to read that "Google has struggled to create such network effects with both Hangouts and Messenger." At my university, all the student groups that I have worked on use Google docs, Messenger, and Hangouts to coordinate. We don't use Messenger a lot, only when we are online working on a document together, but we do use Hangouts weekly. For us, Google is for group productivity (sort of like Slack), but I couldn't see using Google Messenger for communicating with friends or asking questions to a chat bot. I wonder who their target audience is for this new product. Any ideas?

For me, this article is literally the first time I've ever heard of "Google Messenger".

A few other students at my university use Hangouts and Docs, but generally everything is done via email and github.

From the standpoint of someone who had to ask people to use common messenger among a team of people with varying team in the field operation at an event, biggest issue I have seen with Google Hangouts (I guess this also applies to Facebook in that respect as well) is that there seems to be a bit of reluctance from people when they are required signing up to more "blanket" service, in this case, Google.

I guess for some who do not use other Google services (especially when they don't use Gmail, YouTube, etc.) either don't want set up or show high resistance in setting up a new account with Google.

Some privacy concern aside, many of those integrated services works great especially when they are used effectively, but I think the flip side is that those services tend to be "too heavy" for some people who just want to use it as a messenger and nothing else. (Actually, I wish they had an option like that.)

I remember when Google Talk was a thing and actually worked well.

When I first read this, I thought "Are they building a Slack competitor?" And then I got excited over having the power of Google and my gmail within a Slack-like tool and interface.

Then I was disappointed that it's an app that is just an IRC bot that makes Google searches.

Who'd use it? They'll just kill it off in 2 years anyway.

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