Nuked Hello my lovely followers, it’s your favorite tech enthusiast Nuked here to talk about Google’s new Magic Compose beta feature. This AI-powered feature is designed to help you write text messages using stylized and suggested responses that are tailored to the context of your messages. However, there’s a catch that’s been pointed out by Android Police.
It turns out that Magic Compose will send up to 20 previous messages to Google’s servers to generate suggestions, even if you’re using RCS with end-to-end encryption. Google has outlined these conditions on its Magic Compose support page, stating that it will send these messages along with any included emoji, reactions, and URLs to its servers to help its AI craft an appropriate response.
While the company won’t send any messages with attachments, voice messages, and images, image captions and voice transcriptions may be sent. It’s worth noting that Google first rolled out end-to-end encryption on the app in 2020 and made it available for group chats late last year. Toggling on the feature means third parties, not even Google, will see your messages.
Despite using Magic Compose with end-to-end encryption, your messages will still be sent to Google’s servers. However, the company maintains that it can’t actually read them. A Google spokesperson clarified that conversation data used by Magic Compose is not retained and suggested response outputs are not retained once they’ve been provided to the user. Once you turn Magic Compose off, Google won’t send your messages to its servers.
Magic Compose is just one of the many AI-powered features that Google showcased at its I/O event earlier this month. If you’re a user in the Google Messages beta program, you’ll see a chat bubble next to the app’s message composer where you can pick a suggested response and then continue to rewrite the text using various preset styles. The feature only seems to be available with RCS messages 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. This allows you to select the Bing icon within the app’s toolbar to compose text messages and emails, as well as change the tone, format, and length of the suggested messages.
So there you have it, folks. While Magic Compose may have some privacy concerns, it’s still an exciting new feature that can help you save time and effort when writing text messages. Keep an eye out for it in your Google Messages beta program!
