ile all Marshmallow Nougat phones will soon be able to summon Assistant just like xel users are able to do, hasn’t forgotten about Assistant’s other home: lo. A new update rolling out brings a new way to incorporate ’s AI aide into your chats, as well as a few other features.
Until now, calling on Assistant in lo wasn’t the easiest thing in the world: You had to manually type “@google” in the window before sending your query (as well as remember that you could do that). th the latest update, has added a new Assistant icon between the emoji picker microphone. Tap it it’ll automatically insert “@google” bring it into your conversation.
Here’s a GIF of lo’s new GIF searching feature.
And since no conversation is complete without a GIF or two, you can now search for them right inside the app. l you need to do is tap the emoji button, scroll past your suggestions pull until the blue “ll for GIFs” bar fills the screen. Then you can search send GIFs, or throw caution to the wind with the cky bot. en searching for a GIF, type @lucky followed by whatever you want to search for it’ll pick what it thinks is the best one for the occasion.
Finally, you can also add a little more life to your emojis. en you select one of the supported icons, you’ll be able to increase the size animate it using a new slider built into the send button. st tap hold the paper airplane icon you’ll be able to change the size of the icon or (at the biggest size) animate it. However, it only works with 10 common emoji, including smile, heart eyes, grimacing, kissing heart, tears of joy/laughter, unamused.
The update is currently rolling out to Android phones will come to the iOS app soon, says.
Something to talk about: ’s latest messaging app hasn’t exactly set the Android community on fire, but there are definitely some good things about lo, chief among them the Assistant integration. By adding a dedicated icon, it doesn’t just make it easier to use, it lets people know that it’s there, which will help exp its use. ile we’d certainly rather introduce true SMS support than any of the features here, we’ll take what we can get. But mainly, it’s just good to see that hasn’t aboned support for lo.
