Google is reportedly developing a brand new messaging service with a heavy focus on artificial intelligence to compete with rival Facebook with its Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. According a Wall Street Journal report the search engine giant would include a number of so-called “chatbots” in the messaging platform for responding to user queries — similar to “OK Google” for in-chat assistance.
With more than two billion users, messaging services has become the world’s most popular mobile apps, and Google is already lagging behind in comparison to Messenger and WhatsApp by Facebook, WeChat by Tencent Holdings Ltd and some other regional messaging service. Though Google has an existing messaging platform Hangout – but it failed to capture the market share – on the other way rivals with advanced features has grown exponentially – for instance WeChat, China’s most popular app lets users shop, pay bills and book appointments.
Google is allegedly working on the project for at least a year headed by Nick Fox, Vice President of Communications Products of the company. According to the people familiar with the matter in October, Fox offered to buy 200 Labs Inc., a small startup that builds chatbots, but the firm declined the offer.
The report claims, “The company already has done extensive research into artificial intelligence. In June, its researchers announced that they had built a chatbot that learns how to talk with humans by analyzing dialogue from movies.”
There are not many apps available in the messaging platform which supported by bots – a technological response is tipped to answer natural language queries which Facebook added in Messenger M this year. Slack another messaging platform especially aimed for the professional space has a similar service called Slack Bot that gives automatic responses to the queries posted on.
Though it is not clear when Google will launch this service or what it would be called, but it will surely be Google’s another attempt to find a way in the messaging world.
