Why it matters to you
Feeling lucky? If you like GIFs and use Allo, Google just made sending GIFs a little more like Russian Roulette.
Google Allo, a messaging app that first debuted the company’s artificially intelligent Assistant, now lets users chat with another “bot.” That bot, named “Lucky,” won’t give you daily news or weather updates like the Assistant, but it will toss a GIF into your conversations.
Lucky is a bot that finds you GIFs based on what you ask it for, and you can call upon it the same way you trigger the Google Assistant. Type “@Lucky,” and then write what you want to find as a GIF. For example, if you write “@Lucky Hello,” the bot will likely toss a GIF of someone waving.
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A part of Lucky’s charm is that the GIFs it produces are random, unlike GIF search on Facebook Messenger where you can choose something specific to your liking. It looks like the bot just runs a Google search for a related GIF to the phrase, rather than pulling one from a GIF service like Giphy.
You can still search for GIFs in Allo without the use of Lucky via the Google Keyboard, but you’ll need to be on a phone with Android 7.0 Nougat or higher. The bot’s name certainly alludes to the “I’m feeling lucky” option in Google Search, which takes you straight to the first result.
At present, Lucky is the only other bot you can call upon after the “@Google” Assistant. But this seems to be what Google’s larger strategy is for Allo — the ability to use several different bots on the platform for various tasks.
It’s unclear which version of Allo you need to be on to use Lucky — we didn’t receive an update, so it may simply be a server-side switch. Still, to get it, you can update your app to the latest version on the Google Play Store as well as on the iOS App Store. You may have to wait a few days to see the new bot.