Google teases chat apps

Google jumped into the messaging and digital assistant spaces Wednesday at its I/O developer conference with the Allo and Duo apps, powered by Google Assistant. Chat app Allo is a "smart messaging app that learns over time to make conversations more expressive and productive," according to a Google engineering director, Erik Kay. Duo, meanwhile, is a cross-platform video-chat app similar to FaceTime. Both tap into Google Assistant, a platform which Google CEO Sundar Pichai described as "a conversational assistant" that will allow users to have "an ongoing, two-way dialog with Google." About 20 percent of US Google searches are now conducted by voice, in large part because of Google's strength in natural-language processing, Pichai said, which it has spent the last decade building. "Our abilty [in natural-language processing] is far ahead of what other assistants can do," Pichai said.