Technical Opinion: Allo may be more than it appears to be!

Sep25
by Phil Tann on September 25, 2016 at 9:40 am
Posted In: Android, Computing

allo

Allo is here and it’s a nice looking app, but we can’t help but feel there’s something … missing. While the look of the app is really slick and the interface is nice, there have been some negative comments on the reviews around the web and that seems to be representative the feedback we’re seeing at the moment.

So what is missing?

The first thing we think Allo probably should have, and doesn’t, is the ability to be used on more than one device at a time. Even something as simple as SMS can be (kind of) multi device, with the use of apps like Pushbullet to let you send SMS from your tablet or your desktop.

Popular third party messenger apps all have varying degrees of multi-device capability; Telegram works seamlessly across multiple devices, desktops, laptops and basically every modern device that exists. Facebook Messenger works well across platforms simultaneously too. Even WhatsApp (which never used to work on multiple devices) allows you to message from another device using their web interface.

Allo has none of this.

Leaving out integration with SMS seems to have been a major disappointment. Everyone has been waiting for Google to introduce an answer to iMessage for Android, and Allo was thought (perhaps in error) to be that answer. Well, it isn’t.

In Australia, at least, SMS is generally free (or unlimited) for most mobile users, so having some sort of easy SMS bypass really doesn’t matter that much. Elsewhere, this might be more of an issue, but in Australia? Not really.

Allo is missing a ‘killer feature’ draw users to Allo from other products

Allo, as a messenger service, really isn’t significantly different to anything else out there. There’s stickers, file sharing, secret messages, self destructing messages and more. It’s like Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Kik, and basically every other messaging service that’s been around for years in that respect.

Where it does differ is the inclusion of Google Assistant, or in other words, a natural language processing bot powered by Google. It’s kind of like Google Now, but in your chat. But is it that great? Adam Turner from the Sydney Morning Herald nailed it when he said

“As a chat app, Google Allo will struggle to stand out from the crowd, but Google Assistant certainly has the potential to win people over”

… which leads to the next important points when it comes to Allo.

Let’s talk about Google Assistant

The Google assistant is currently sitting somewhere between gimmick, niche and outright brilliance and as a component of the Allo app, it has received its fair share of feedback and criticism.

The gimmick side is covered when you look at the work of our Editor in Chief at Ausdroid who spent reasonable time with the app prior to its public release put together a list of fun things to do with Google Assistant.

It’s niche, because Google Assistant doesn’t really do anything that you can’t already get Google to do. How many of us honestly want to interact with Google via a chat interface? OK Google and Search work just fine, and I don’t feel a need to message Google to get the same results.

Of course, there are benefits to the Assistant way; you don’t have to be online — you can queue up a request and Google will get back to you when you’re back in a signal area. But for most of us, those circumstances are few and far between, making the benefits of a chat interface to Assistant somewhat less useful.

For me, the brilliance is the development of the voice recognition from Google Now and Android Wear which are leaps ahead of previous iterations of the function, into what is now a naturally interactive experience. The recognition extends to not only the words you’re saying but the natural flow of speech and even Australian accents now.

Did Google intend to compete with other messaging apps, or is it up to something else?

This got me thinking, what if Google don’t necessarily want it to be a competitor to Whatsapp? What if they don’t want it to be a replacement for your SMS application? What if what users are seeing as features missing is very deliberate on the part of Google to ensure that they don’t have eighty million users? Perhaps what they’re looking for is some real world test cases for only a single component of Allo. When I backtracked to Google I/O this year and thought about the announcements, looked at the interface and active components there is something that stands out to me – Google Home.

Google’s internal testing can only account for so much data, so…

How good would it be to get the Assistant out there in the wild, gathering data and in particular voice input from real world users for analysis and the long term better capability of Google Home which has the very real possibility of being a blockbuster product for Google and a lifestyle change for users.

I believe that Allo may be a sacrificial lamb, sent out to slaughter in order to get a heap of very useful, real world data pumped into the Google Assistant which is the centrepiece of Google Home. Knowing full well that they would get data smashed in for a short period of time, perhaps only a day or two for some users then dwindling down to the steady flow of data that they’ll get from the faithful few who will continue to use the app steadily (providing more and more data to Google to improve the product) because they have a few acquaintances who will do so with them.

So while on the surface it may be a feature lacking product, before you judge it too harshly based on what you see – Think about what you don’t see and what could be behind the product. When I took the time to think about it, I found a potential explanation as to why a company that deals with generally outstanding products would release one that is seemingly well below par for them.

Do you think this is a plausible explanation for Allo’s apparent failure to deliver on expectations, or have Google simply dropped the ball?

Thanks to one of Chris Rowland, Dep. Editor in Chief of Ausdroid (and friend) for your assistance putting the structure of this piece together.

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“It’s all good, no discernible change”

Jun16
by Jo Tann on June 16, 2016 at 6:00 pm
Posted In: Personal

Tuesday was MRI day. A long day.

Into DOSA (Day Of Surgery Admissions) at 7.30, he was, as per usual, second on the list. This time around we had a little bit of a twist, Alex’s port needed flushing. Rather than have to go upstairs after his MRI, put numbing cream on, wait for 30 mins and then be accessed and flushed, the lovely nurses in DOSA said they could access and flush his port before his MRI and then they could use his port line for the anaesthetic rather than put a cannula in his hand (which he hates). Numbing cream went on without a fuss, and while we were waiting for it to take effect we saw the lovely Doctor Claire who Alex has been seeing in ENT. We said hello, and since she was there I thought I’d ask her a quick question. Alex had surgery for grommets 5 weeks ago and has had an ear infection ever since. I wanted to know if I should take Alex to the GP to get some oral antibiotics as the drops didn’t seem to be clearing it up. Instead of saying yes yes take him to someone else not my problem, she told me to get one of the nurses to page her before Alex went in for his MRI and she would come and take a look herself!
Once the numbing cream had taken hold we went into the next door ward’s treatment room to be accessed and flushed. Alex was very good and was very patient through the whole procedure, sitting on my lap on the bed very calmly. A nurse appeared at the door and said it was time to go, so off we went to the holding bay. Sitting downstairs we said a quick goodbye to the DOSA nurse who had taken us down and Alex (who knows the routine better than I do) asked to put a sticker on blankie. When children take toys or blankets into a scan like this the staff put a sticker with their name on it just to make sure it stays with them. I said sure no worries and went to get blankie out of my bag. Only problem was blankie wasn’t there. I’m not sure I can convey here the depth of the panic that ran through me. Blankie has been one of the most important things in the world to Alex since before he was diagnosed, a source of comfort and a constant to cling to when everything else was scary and hard. Blankie has got us through a lot of tough situations and to loose her is simply unthinkable (yes blankie is a girl). Leaving Alex with his friend nurse Lyn I raced back upstairs and caught up with the DOSA nurse before she had made it back to DOSA! The only place I could think blankie might have been left was the treatment room where Alex had been accessed. Thankfully that is exactly where I found her. Breathing again for the first time in 5 minutes I headed back downstairs. Alex was chatting happily away to the nurses and was happily unaware of the drama.

Alex has a particular routine when it comes to anaesthesia, he gets to hold the mask to his face, smell all the colours (red, yellow, pink, green, purple, orange and blue), then everyone has to sing the rainbow song. Part way through the song the anaesthtist turns on the gas and he falls asleep just as the song ends. This time, for the first time, he had his port line in and the anaesthtist just attached the syringe of propofol and he was asleep in 10 seconds flat. I wasn’t aware of how fast it would be and hadn’t sung the song or really prepared him for it, he was expecting his usual routine and all of a sudden he was waking up in recovery. Needless to say that he was more than a little bit cranky when he woke up. Nine times out of ten he has a smooth wake up, the tenth one is epic.
When I figured out that he was grumpy about not having his usual routine (which was tricky since he just wanted to yell and scream rather than talk) I managed to get him to sit on my lap, we gave him a mask and ran oxygen through it and sang the rainbow song. After that he calmed down a bit, some more snuggles and a bit of playschool and he was back to being happy.

As we hadn’t had time to page Dr Claire before hand I asked one of the nurses if it was possible to page her now. She actually came in in between patients(!) and had a quick look in his ears. She said to keep up the drops on one side for another 2 days and took a swab of the other side since it was looking a bit nasty. We had an appointment booked for the following week so we thanked her profusely and said we would see her on Wednesday.

After ice cream, jelly and milk we were on our way home.

The waiting is never fun, but fortunately this time the wait was only a few days. Alex’s oncologist – Dr Ram – said it perfectly so I’ll quote him here verbatim;

“It’s all good, no discernible change”

Big smiles all round really

🙂

We saw Dr Claire on Wednesday, turns out that Alex has a yeast infection in his right ear, probably because he has had drops in there for so long! so we are stopping the drops and hoping that the ear will dry out and all will be well.

We’ll keep you posted 🙂

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It’s been awhile….

Jun02
by Jo Tann on June 2, 2016 at 6:45 pm
Posted In: Personal

So it’s been a while since we posted anything. Alex hasn’t had any real medical dramas recently (yay). He had his grommets redone two weeks ago, and we are now suffering through another ear infection (sigh) but otherwise things are good. He has an MRI Tuesday next week so the tension level here at Tann HQ will be running a little high for a while, hopefully all will be well (touch wood), we’ll let you know.

I was recently asked to write a piece for Alex’s school – a note to new student’s parents – and since I’m not sure where/when/if it will ever be printed I thought I’d share it here. Hopefully it will give you an insight as to why we send Alex to a school which is an hour’s drive away, they really are worth it!

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When you get told your child has a permanent visual impairment it’s a pretty horrible day. All your half formed ideas of what their future is going to be like are shattered, and the ones which replace it, at least initially, are pretty dispiriting. It’s a perfectly normal thing to try and hang on to your originial ideas, amend them a bit perhaps, but still try and keep your child’s experiences as close to “normal” as possible, they can still make friends, dream of what they want to do when they grow up and they can still go to a “normal” school.

When we were told my son Alex was permanently and completely blind, I was hopeful that he could still go to our local primary school. He had managed at kindy perfectly well, he had an SSO (school support officer) to help him move around, so why wouldn’t it be a great idea for him to go to the school the kindy was attached to? Well, it turns out there are a lot of really good reasons why S.A.S.V.I was a much better option than our local mainstream school.

The first thing to note here is that S.A.S.V.I isn’t a ‘special’ school. It is a specialist school. Students at S.A.S.V.I are taught the same curriculum as the children in mainstream schools, it’s just that it’s either in braille or large print, and the delivery of the curriculum is adjusted to accommodate non visual learning.

The thing is, sending a visually impaired child to a mainstream school doesn’t keep that child’s life closer to “normal” it actually reinforces their difference. They will, in the nicest and most well meaning of ways, be reminded all day every day that they are not like the other kids. The other children will have to be reminded they need to take special care not to jostle or run into your child, that your child can’t see like them, that you can’t just make physical gestures – you have to speak for them to know you are there. Being visually impaired is isolating enough without being constantly told you are different to everyone else.
In addition, again in the most well meaning of ways, both adults and children try to help a visually impaired child, finding the toy they want for them, picking up an item which has been dropped, telling them things they could (with a bit of effort) have found out for themselves. This sort of help decreases the motivation towards independence, after all, why would you try to do something difficult if everyone around you is willing to do it for you?

At S.A.S.V.I all the children have some level of visual impairment. Not being able to see is the norm. They don’t develop the mindset of ‘I’m different’, they are just at school, doing school stuff, hanging out with their classmates on equal terms. The teachers make sure that all the children under their care develop their independence, encouraging them always to do as much as is possible for themselves.

If your child is, like mine, learning using braille, then attending S.A.S.V.I is even more beneficial. A teacher in a mainstream school is not in any way expected to know braille. Even with the best will in the world, trying to adapt your teaching to suit a visually impaired (VI) child, teach them a very complex system of communication whilst at the same time trying to learn it yourself AND still teach the other 30 children in your classroom is an almost impossible task. The teachers at S.A.S.V.I already know braille in all its twists and intricacies. They know how to adjust their teaching to suit VI children. They know already what they can realistically expect from VI children (quite a lot) and how support them without doing everything for them.

One of the other great benefits of attending S.A.S.V.I is the Independent Living Skills (ILS) subject. Sighted children generally do not need to be specifically taught things like how to chop and grate or how to spread butter on bread or how to stir a bowl of ingredients so that everything stays in the bowl. They learn by watching – usually at home – and then practice what they have seen. You only really realise how much kids pick up by watching you do things when you suddenly have to explicitly teach them all these skills. The school, in association with Guide Dogs Australia, also teach Orientation and Mobility, how to navigate using the sounds around them, or by trailing their fingers along the wall or by using a cane or hundreds of other techniques. The aim of all this is to create independent adults, providing VI children with the tools they will need to live on their own, just as any other child would aim to do.

There is something called the rule of expectations – what others expect of us is what we try to achieve. If you are told you will perform badly on a maths test because it’s hard then you probably will. However the reverse is also true, if you are told you can be great, do anything you set your mind to, succeed against all odds, then you probably will.

As parents we want to do what is best for our kids, we love the little rascals after all, and all the staff at S.A.S.V.I are there to help us give our kids the support and high expectations they need to be anything they want to be.

“Those who believe in our ability do more than stimulate us. They create for us an atmosphere in which it becomes easier to succeed.” – John H Spalding

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