Millions of Indians are making their way online for the first time, discovering new ways to connect and share with friends and family. And because WhatsApp usage is ubiquitous in the country, they land on the Facebook-owned messaging platform sooner or later. And one way of expressing themselves is through "Good Morning" messages sent over WhatsApp. These messages are usually delivered in the form of images and have a pithy quote attached.
Even accounting for WhatsApp's compression — which reduces the file sizes to under 500KB — thousands of such forwards tend to clutter up a phone in a matter of months. If you're a regular WhatsApp user and are in a lot of groups, the deluge can get pretty infuriating. It doesn't bother me as much as I mute most groups as a general rule and don't set media to automatically download onto my device, but I cannot count the number of times I've had to clear the internal storage of a family member's phone.
Thankfully, Google is coming to the rescue with its Files Go app. For the uninitiated, Files Go is a storage manager that automatically looks through your device's apps and internal storage to serve up recommendations on files you can delete.
Google found that one out of every three smartphone users in India run out of space on their devices daily, so it turned to machine learning to find a solution. The result is a special filter within Files Go that deletes these "Good Morning" messages en masse.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Google group product manager Josh Woodward explained how his team relied on AI to weed out the specific messages:
We were trying to deconstruct what is the DNA of a good morning message for months. It's been a lot of hard work to get it right.
In addition to decluttering your phone, Files Go also lets you easily send and receive files. If you're interested in seeing what the app is capable of, hit up the Play Store from the link below to download Files Go.
