Neural Network-Generated Illustrations in Allo
research.googleblog.com
research.googleblog.com
Not only that, but this 'dumb' application has immediate value(gets more people to use google's service and thus display ads to them). Because of the value these dumb applications have, they could help drive AI research and development of general purpose machine learning hardware.
Sometimes it's ok to do 'dumb' things.
I'm not against such applications and share your opinion that they are great. But it's not new. The field has always been this way.
I hate that.
I have Messages, which i think is Google's... and i only downloaded it because the apps from Samsung, Verizon, and Facebook went to war in January (on my phone at least) and somehow I ended up getting texts in either the samsung app or verizon but never both, but group conversations in facebook messenger, but only the verizon app would actually allow picture messages to be viewable if i sent them to my mother.
I also have Allo, because a (<-- not plural) coworker and I were curious about it. I think it solved that they didn't have facebook but did have apple, or maybe not i don't know. I also downloaded Duo and haven't opened it since, and I had hangouts, but i'm so very angry that Google screwed that up yet again. I have zero confidence in Google products fulfilling any of my needs completely ever again, and I really used to be the Google-champion of my friends... sigh.
* Allo
* Hangouts
* Messenger (Android)
* Messenger (Facebook)
It's like SMS-Roulette.
Another app that should run into a container and be post-processed by computer vision is the web browser. We need to contain the browser itself (more privacy) and keep the pesky ads out of our eyes in a way that is impossible to hack by clever scripting or ad-block detection. On the next round, ad publishers would have to create adversarial ads that fool the classifier which would be a whole lot more difficult.
On the desktop/browser, I guess there isn't a consumer-focused messaging app anymore. Unless I'm missing something obvious, Google apparently ceded that ground to others.
I'm beginning to realize why Allo is as goofy as it is. It's not actually a messaging app. It's a machine learning playground app with a feature to send stuff to other people occasionally. Allo makes more sense as a concept if you look at it that way, though as a product, that's a bonkers idea that basically no one needs. Hence the non-existent user base.
The original TOS communicator was just a dumb pipe into the ear of a switchboard operator (the naval rankings Uhura bosses around, presumably.)
In TNG and beyond, there doesn't seem to be "operators" per se, but the device still has a Conversational UX. Less like a phone, more like the Amazon Echo.
Presumably, in the future there will still be individually-packaged suites of software (and even such suites existing as rival products); but likely, in something like a space-navy, everyone has got the same software, and it's all been centrally requisitioned and integrated into monolithic monster workflows that show no hint of its origin. I imagine personal "communicators", despite the CUI, would resemble today's phones much more closely, as there'd have to be a way to install your own software packages and then manage the resultant overlapping suites of functionality, without requiring some full-time engineers to put it together into a streamlined system.
> That Google has several apps which compete and conflict with each other is absurd.
Google is a bunch of independent teams competing and conflicting with each-other (to launch products, mostly.)
The jockeying would be a lot clearer if each team had a distinct marque, beyond just "Google" or "Google Research" or "Android" or "Chromium Project."
Well, Google needs very badly to stop that then. If you think internal competition somehow breeds better products, then by all means run the company that way. But pay one person to keep this fucking Thunderdome isolated from the public. Someone needs to declare a winner before you trot out 83 contestants, all of which suck because you couldn't make a damned decision.
I'm certain that four random engineers don't get to make a new thing, slap the Google brand on it, and prominently sell it on the front page of the Google store without someone approving it first.
And even if that were the case, it's a pathology to be solved, not a reasonable justification for them to continue to be catastrophically bad at making consumer-facing products. If there's no one entity called "Google" that can stop them from releasing absolute garbage that they then never once update, then I'll just rephrase my complaint to "Google needs to come up with a single entity that can stop them from releasing absolute garbage that they then never update."
I'm doing kremlinology here: attempting to model an opaque organizational structure so that you can change your behavior to avoid its inferred structural inadequacies. Because any organization in need of kremlinology ain't gonna be able to change in response to even a top-down order to do so.
Google can't stop being catastrophically Balkanized, any more than IBM can stop being catastrophically monolithic, or Facebook can stop being catastrophically lackadaisical toward code-base quality. It's in their DNA: in the kind of people they have hired, who now choose who they hire, and will continue to be biased however they're biased even if a top-down order tries to push against those biases.
Hangouts does have an enterprise story, but I don't understand what Google's strategy is. I'm not sure they have one.
I can see how it makes sense from an engineering point of view but I just installed Allo to try it out and it hasn't rolled out to me yet.
I'm rather unlikely to remember to try again in a few days/weeks etc.
This has happened multiple times in similar scenarios. I dug out my Gear VR to try the new Oculus browser. I didn't get it for 4 weeks (only a particular interest in WebVR kept me coming back to see if it was there).
Surely this is squandering good press and good will?
AFAICT, they don't expect this announcement to reach or sway anyone who's going to use the feature; this post is more there to serve as genuine news—i.e. it's written to provoke water-cooler "what Google is up to" conversations among developers. (It's on the Google Research blog, after all; what consumer would even see it?)
- I have never used Allo or really even know what it is. I am downloading it now though.
- I hope it does more than just auto-create a Bitmoji character. I wonder how its going to distinguish itself from other avatar creating apps.
(disclaimer: I work here)
We're still pretty early stage, but hope to open up our developer API/SDK soon!