Sources: Google has been working on new messaging app for over a year that supports chatbots and uses AI to answer questions and perform other tasks
Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App — Users will be able to text friends or a chatbot that will scour the Web and other sources to answer a question
Context & Ripple Effects
This December 2015 report was the first look at what became Allo: six months later Google announced the smart-reply messaging app alongside developer tools for building chatbots at I/O 2016, explicitly mirroring Microsoft's bot strategy, and shipped it that September. The WSJ scoop matters because it shows Google treating conversation itself as an interface to its search brain — text a question, get the Web scoured for you.
The thread didn't end with Allo's quiet fade. By 2024 Google was again reported to be building customizable chatbots potentially modeled on celebrities, suggesting the 2015 thesis — assistants living inside chat rather than behind a search box — kept resurfacing internally even after the first product failed to stick.
First-order effects
- Google gains a direct answer surface inside messaging, letting users query the Web by texting a bot instead of leaving the app — putting search queries on a conversational rail.
- Microsoft's parallel chatbot push means both companies are now racing to sign up developers who build bots for these messaging platforms.
Second-order effects
- Developers face a new distribution decision: building bot experiences for messaging apps creates an app-store-like layer where Google and Microsoft control discovery and ranking of conversational services.
- If chatbots answer questions directly from Web sources, publishers and sites that live off search traffic see their content consumed inside a conversation rather than visited.
Third-order effects
- Allo's Smart Reply and Assistant previewed the pattern now visible across the corpus — assistants embedded in every surface, from Gmail to Hangouts — pointing toward messaging evolving from person-to-person pipes into agent-to-human workspaces.
- Google's repeated returns to conversational agents (2015's secret app, Allo, the 2024 custom-bot effort) suggest the company treats failed first attempts as iterations toward an assistant layer that outlives any single product.
The trend: Messaging apps are being rebuilt from person-to-person channels into AI-assistant surfaces, with Google iterating on the idea since this 2015 report and rivals like Microsoft following the same playbook.