Less than three months after its English version was launched, Google's messaging app, named Allo, arrived in Brazil last Monday (5).
Unlike other chats, Allo features artificial intelligence, allowing Google to interact in a conversation almost like a personal assistant, scheduling appointments, providing internet information, mapping routes, and playing YouTube videos—all without leaving the chat.
The assistant is activated in the conversation when the "chatbot" function is triggered, or whenever a message starts with @google. To participate in conversations, Allo extracts information from its own platform tools, such as the search engine and Maps, for example, but it first needs to understand the conversation, which is why the Portuguese version is important.
Brazil is only the third country to receive the app, which was first launched in the USA and then in Germany. According to Google's Vice President of Communications, Nick Fox, the arrival of Allo in Brazil, before debuting in most European countries, is part of the company's strategy to popularize its products in emerging markets, unlike its main competitors. Siri, Apple's assistant, got its Portuguese version four years after its global launch, and Microsoft's assistant, Cortana, took over two years.
“We knew Brazil would be a great market for us. But as soon as we launched, we saw that even without customization and improvements for Brazilian Portuguese, we already had many users in Brazil, which reinforced the importance of doing a good job,” Fox justifies.
The main challenge for Google in adapting the app for Brazil lies in the complexity of the Portuguese language. To interact in chats, Allo needs not only to translate conversations but also to understand the culture behind the language, in order to comprehend and contextualize slang and typically Brazilian names, which is only possible thanks to the artificial intelligence behind the device, allowing Allo to talk about soap operas, football, and even provide recipes for rice and beans.