Google developing new messaging app

Stated by sources familiar with the matter, Google is looking incorporate its artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbot technology into it, allowing users to ask questions from within the app, receiving answers from the web.

The move is strategic since messaging apps and chat bots threaten Google’s role as the Internet’s premier discovery engine and Google is building its new mobile-messaging service to catch up with rivals in the fast-growing messaging arena, the WSJ said.

Sources also told the WSJ that Google veteran Nick Fox has been leading a team working on the new service for at least a year. Now the company’s main messaging platform is Google Hangouts, which is a fantastic messaging app, actually, but doesn’t really rope people in the way competitors like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp do.

Taking a page from dominant players like Kik and WeChat, the app will reportedly feature an emphasis on chatbots, programs that users can talk to within the app, and will leverage the company’s burgeoning expertise in artificial intelligence. One online tech news site has reported that Fox has a new role as the communications products vice president.

200 Labs has developed a rating and marketplace service for chatbots an app called Telegram that offers hundreds of different chatbos, devoted to different subjects such as image search, weather, dating and news. Some services are adding other capabilities-WeChat, for instance, lets users shop, pay bills and book appointments. Google has not even provided an exact release date of the smart messaging application but hopefully we will get to know more information about this service in 2016, which we expect the smart app to be officially announced.

On the service, users should be able to message contacts or speak to a chatbot, which will do the legwork for any queries the user may have. Google declined to comment.

“This is early in the journey to build M into an at-scale service”, Facebook’s David Marcus wrote in a post. On the face of it, the tool sounds like an amalgamation of Hangouts and OK Google, neatly combining what the company has learned from both.