Google's Allo funnels the limitless power of the internet into a simple messaging app

Google wants you to get a little closer with, well, Google (GOOG, GOOGL) via its newest messaging app, Allo.

Available for download for Android and iOS beginning today, and reaching most users by the end of the week, Allo is designed to compete with messaging apps like Facebook (FB) Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat and Apple’s (AAPL) iMessage. But Allo has an ace up its sleeve: Google. I’ve been using Allo for the past week, and it’s one heck of a trick.

See, unlike Google’s current messaging app, Hangouts, Allo lets you chat with Google itself via its new Google Assistant (in addition to chatting with individuals and groups). Google Assistant lets you ask Google questions and get replies within the app itself. It’s also smart enough to see what you’re talking about with friends and provide relevant recommendations without prompting.

Say, “Hello!” to Allo

Introduced at Google’s I/O developer conference in June, Allo is a mobile-only messaging app, so you won’t be able to use it on your work computer to help pass the time like you do with Hangouts or Facebook Messenger. Like WeChat and WhatsApp, Allo requires you to use your mobile phone number to create an account. It literally took me less than two minutes to set up the app.

Once finished, Allo automatically detected which people in my phone’s contact list also had the app, so I could begin chatting with them right away. If people didn’t have Allo, I was still able to chat with them through the app, though the experience was significantly downgrade on their end.

As with most messaging apps, Allo offers group chats, so you can get in touch with all of your friends at once if you’re, say, planning a party. Of course, the conversation will likely descend into chaos within five minutes. Then, several people will ask to be removed from the chat, because the notifications are driving them insane. At least that’s how my group chats usually go.

Fun with stickers

If you’re going to launch a messaging app today, you better be darn sure it has stickers, emojis and any number of other ridiculous features, or you might as well not release the app at all. Okay, goofy add-ons aren’t that important, but they’re what users want and Allo has them in spades.

By tapping the plus sign in the app’s text box you can pull up a quick menu that points you to various emojis and stickers you can add to your messages. You can also add photos from your camera roll, take photos for your messages and share your location on a map

Allo’s stickers are particularly interesting, as well-known artists created them with a little help from Google. According to Nick Fox, Google’s VP of communications products, the company used anonymized user data to determine the words and phrases most often used in chats. The company then took the words and phrases to artists who created stickers for them. The result is a library of stickers that are silly, sweet and, often, downright bizarre. My favorite is a sloth riding a slice of pizza, mostly because it’s appropriate for virtually every conversation.

Photos I sent via Allo also stretched to the edges of the screen. That’s a huge improvement over Google’s Hangouts, which presents photos in compressed frames. You can draw directly on your photos in Allo, something you can’t do in Hangouts.

Allo also includes a new way to let you yell in your messages when caps lock simply won’t cut it. With “whisper-shout” you can type something into the app’s text box then press the send button and slide it up to blow up the text or drag it down to shrink it. If your friends are anything like mine, they’ll use the feature to send things like “FART” in giant letters — and for that alone it’s worth it.