Google has finally started rolling out the beta of Magic Compose, its new Messages feature that uses AI to help you write text messages. However, as indicated by android policethe feature comes with a pretty big caveat: it will send up to “20 past messages” to Google’s servers to generate suggestions – even if you’re using RCS with end-to-end encryption (E2EE).
Google outlines these terms on her Magic Compose support page, pointing out that it will send these messages, along with all included emojis, comments and URLs, to its servers to help its AI formulate an appropriate response. The company adds that it will not send messages with attachments, voice messages and images, but notes that “image captions and voice transcripts can be sent.”
Google first rolled out E2EE in the app in 2020 and made it available for group chats late last year. If you enable the feature, third parties – not even Google – will be able to see your posts. While using Magic Compose with E2EE shall sends your messages to Google’s servers, the company claims it still can’t read them.
Google spokesperson Justin Rende further clarified The edge that “conversation data used by Magic Compose is not retained” and that “suggested response outputs are not retained after they have been provided to the user.” Once you disable Magic Compose, Google will stop sending your messages to its servers.
If you have access to the feature, you’ll see a chat bubble next to the app’s message composer. From there, you can choose a suggested answer and then proceed to rewrite the text using different preset styles, such as “chill,” “enthusiastic,” or “Shakespeare.” The feature only appears to be available with RCS messaging for now, and there’s no word on when it might support SMS/MMS.
Microsoft has also rolled out a similar feature in its keyboard app, SwiftKey. Allows you to select the Bing icon in the app’s toolbar to compose text messages and emails, and change the tone, format, and length of the suggested messages.
