Allo is a smart chat app that's designed to give you plenty of options when it comes to chatting to your friends. Google introduced the new app at Google I/O 2016. 

Rather than just giving you a straight down the line messaging app, Allo has been designed to make chat more fun and interactive. It's based on your phone number - like WhatsApp - and it seems to be going after all the popular chat apps, with emoji, stickers and plenty of features. 

One of the hot features is whisper or shout. This will let you slide up or down on the send button to change the size of your reply, meaning there's no need to write in caps all the time when you're angry.

Allo will incorporate Google Assistant, allowing a huge range of smart functions too. That will range from the ability to have suggestions for dinner locations and make reservations, as well as being able to recognise images and suggest smart replies.

That means that Allo should be a much smarter approach to messaging, removing the need to constantly leave the app to find information. You'll be able to search from within Allo, as well as make those reservations through services like OpenTable. 

Taking this further, Google Assistant can have conversations within Allo, giving you loads of interactive options, like finding videos or playing games. 

When it comes to privacy, Allo will offer an incognito mode like Chrome does. You'll get discrete notifications, end-to-end encryption, as well as the ability set time limitations on your messages, as well as completely remove them once you're done. 

Google also announced Dou, a companion video app for Allo. Duo and Allo will be available in the summer for Android and iOS.