Google Allo and Duo to take on WhatsApp with AI

Google has announced Google Assistant, a cloud-powered artificially intelligent personal assistant. Unlike Google Now, you interact with it in the form of a conversation - either in Google's new mobile chat apps or at home using an Amazon Echo-like mic-equipped speaker. Allo is a competitor to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, with the benefit of Google Assistant. It can automatically suggest replies to messages in your conversations, even if it takes the form of a photo. So, if someone sends you a photo of a cat then Allo will suggest a reply of'that's a cute British short hair' using its image recognition algorithms. Allo will link your conversations to the wider web too.