Google's New Super-Powerful Messaging App Is Here, and It's Called Allo

The app is powered by Google's newly announced AI bot Google Assistant and Google's Knowledge Graph. Once you sign up with your phone number and link your Google account to the app, you're ready to go.

It's got cutesy little features like easy-to-use volume control to "shout" messages (read as: make font bigger). But some of the "woah future" moments came with a demo of impressive image recognition built into the app. For example, when you send a picture of a dog, Allo will automatically populate possible responses because it recognizes that the image is of a dog. Yes, Allo is so advanced, it will even do the messaging for you.

You can also message @google and launch all the powers of the Google search engine brain, powered by Google's own Knowledge Graph. You can also this robot text messaging a group experience.

Google didn't definitively express that Allo is a replacement for Hangouts and Messenger. But with all these genuinely exciting features, "out with the old and in with the new" .