This week, the Code Conference is happening in Los Angeles, CA. This is a conference where a number of executives are asked to come and talk with members of Recode's staff, although it's mostly Walt Mossberg talking with them. Today's agenda includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai who spoke about all sorts of topics during his interview with Mossberg. This included talking about machine learning and how that is going to help Google, and why it's important to Google. Also speaking about Daydream which the company announced at Google I/O last month. Not to mention China, and possibly coming back to China, which has always been a big topic of discussion surrounding Google. But perhaps more interesting, is his thoughts on messaging and the new messaging apps his company announced last month, Allo and Duo.

Pichai noted that they are working with carriers to evolve RCS messaging, so that it is an interoperable messaging standard. RCS stands for Rich Communications Services and is a platform that enables delivery of communication experiences beyond the simple voice and SMS messages. This platform provides users with instant messaging or chat, one to one or to groups, live video as well as file sharing across devices on any network. Pichai also noted that he would "love to see users on iOS be able to message users on Android and vice versa". He also hopes that the industry heads in that direction. It's something that we have already with a few apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram. But in terms of just plain old text messaging or SMS, it's possible, but not the same experience.


While Pichai didn't say a whole lot about Allo and Duo, which are slated to be launching later this summer, he did mention that Google is working with carriers on RCS messaging. This is pretty important, as changes to messaging need to go through carriers if they have any hope of becoming a new standard. Allo and Duo is an OTT (Over-The-Top) service, and is going to be available on both iOS and Android later this summer. This makes things a bit confusing, seeing as Pichai says Google is backing RCS, yet their new messaging services do not use it.