Google, Inc. is building a new messaging app to take on Facebook, Inc.’s Messenger and WhatsApp, according to a report Tuesday.

The Wall Street Journal quotes “people familiar with the matter” as saying that the tech giant had been working on the new app for over one year and is aiming to offer a multi-faceted service that not only provides chat between friends, but a smart, possibly artificial intelligence powered chat bot that will deliver answers to questions from users.

Google veteran Nick Fox is said to be leading the team developing the new application, but it’s unclear at this stage what the app might be called or whether it will even see the light of day.

The report also claims that Google is aiming to allow other developers to build chatbots that run on the service, so users would be able to receive an answer from an app that has the information they are looking for, potentially allowing cross-app integration as well with Google’s app becoming the central control interface for other apps that support the service.

“All users care about is a convenient way to find what they are looking for and if Google isn’t in front of the consumer that is a problem for them,” Sherpa Capital Co-Founder Scott Standford told the paper. “Messaging is a subset of the Internet where Google is not strong. They have to win and be the dominant player in messaging.”

Missed the boat

Google’s interest in the space is to be expected at a time where messaging apps from other companies continue to evolve into a one-stop shop for a multitude of services, all of which threaten to take eyeballs, and hence traffic, away from Google itself.

Messaging apps such as those from LINE Corp. offer payment services, streaming music, and even taxi hailing, and while Facebook’s Messenger app isn’t quite at that level yet in the United States, it’s heading in the same direction.

If Google is to remain relevant, particularly among millennials, it needs a slice of that market, although given its abysmal history when it comes to social networking products it would need to pull a serious rabbit out of a hat with an amazing product to be able to compete in the current market, and that’s not counting the fact that users tend to use services their friends are on to begin with, a product outreach problem that is hard to take on for any new service.

It may have indeed missed the boat in terms of coming to market so late in the day.

Google for its part has neither confirmed nor denied the report.

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