 Google promised us that we would get a new chat app from them this summer, and it's the last day of summer. Good news, they kept their promise, it's here. This is Google's Allo. Now, why do you need yet another messaging app in your life? Well, Google's answer is that this app has the Google Assistant in it, which is a smart bot that you can have a conversation with, or it can join in your other conversations with your friends, which is pretty neat. But you should be aware that at launch, it's a preview edition, which means it can be a little bit buggy. First, you can install Allo on iPhones or Android phones, and actually, that's it. It doesn't work on tablets or on desktop. That's because Allo is tied to your phone number to know who you are. When you first sign up, it's gonna send you a text message, you confirm that, and then you associate it with your Google account if you want to. And then, honestly, it's just a messaging app. Texting works exactly like you'd expect. There are some cute features. You can drag up or down on the send button to make your text really big or really small, sort of like a simple version of what iMessage can do. And yeah, you can have group conversations. There are a ton of sticker packs, all made by artists that Google hand chose. You can get to them by hitting this little plus button here, and you download them by hitting this little button. But you should keep an eye out for the little play icons inside the sticker packs. They mean that the stickers are animated. Now, there's no GIF search here, and there's no crazy full-screen animations like you can get on iMessage, but on Android, at least, you can doodle on top of your pictures before you send them, and on both phones, there's an option inside Settings to save all of the images from your chat to your camera roll automatically. Now, you see these little check boxes? They tell you if your messages are read. White means sent, green means received, and green with a double check box means that it's been read. And you can long press on any message, too, to see more details about it. Now, everything that you send in Allo is stored on Google servers until you delete them from your phone. But if you don't like that, you can set up an incognito chat, and then all of your texts are private and encrypted end-to-end. They don't show details and notifications, and you can even set an expiration timer like this so that your messages auto-destruct. Okay, so those are the basics, but what about this Assistant thing? Well, here's the deal. There are two basic ways to talk to the Assistant. The first is just an ongoing chat where you can just type or speak your questions directly to Google's Assistant. The Assistant will then reply with its best answer, and you can ask follow-up questions. So here's an example. I can type, my team is the Vikings. And now Google knows that my favorite team is, of course, the Vikings. Then I can type, how did my team do? And then Google gives me the answer right there in the chat. Okay, so look down here. These little guys are suggestion chips. They show up in the Google Assistant, and even in your normal chats. They try to guess what you're going to want to say next, and then you can just tap them to say it. So I'll tap highlights, and then I can watch a video of the Vikings defeating the Packers. Clearly, Google's Assistant knows what matters here, videos of the Vikings beating the Packers. But where it gets really interesting is in your chats. You can type at Google in a chat to have it answer questions right inside your conversation. You can use it to settle a bar bet or search for restaurants together, or even play an emoji game. Oh, there's one last thing you should know at the Assistant. You see those tiny little thumbs up, thumbs down buttons there? Those are actually for feedback for when the Assistant gets something wrong, or maybe right. So you can tap the thumbs down button and then tell it how it screwed something up. And yo, I gotta tell you, the Assistant kinda screws up a lot. Google is way better at this AI stuff than basically anybody else. But somehow inside a chat when it gets it wrong, it feels a little bit more frustrating than when it happens when, say, Siri or Google Now is talking to you. And that's Allo. Like I said, it's a perfectly good, fast, functional little text messaging app for phones. And sometimes that Assistant is pretty neat too. But I don't know if the Assistant is enough to get you to stop using Hangouts. Or iMessage. Or WhatsApp. Or WeChat. Or Telegram. Or Facebook Messenger. Or Twitter DMs.