Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Google’s Allo app can reveal what you’ve searched to your friends - Recode

Conversational context crossing

"A unique feature of Allo is that you can use Assistant while in the middle of a conversation with a friend. You could, for example, ask Assistant to search for restaurants in a certain area, while you’re talking to a friend about where to eat.

But Assistant isn’t perfect, and sometimes it responds with answers unrelated to questions at hand, or it will respond with an answer to an earlier question — and it’s then that it can inadvertently reveal a previous search query.

In the middle of our conversation, my friend directed Assistant to identify itself. Instead of offering a name or a pithy retort, it responded with a link from Harry Potter fan website Pottermore. The link led to an extract from “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” the fifth book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

But the response was not merely a non sequitur. It was a result related to previous searches my friend said he had done a few days earlier."
Google’s Allo app can reveal what you’ve searched to your friends - Recode

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