Google’s Magic Compose beta is here — but it sends your messages to Google

Google has lastly began to roll out the beta of Magic Compose, its new Messages characteristic that makes use of AI that will help you write textual content messages. Nonetheless, as pointed out by Android Police, the characteristic comes with a fairly large caveat: it would ship as much as “20 earlier messages” to Google’s servers to generate solutions — even if you happen to’re utilizing RCS with end-to-end encryption (E2EE).

Google outlines these circumstances on its Magic Compose support page, noting that it’s going to ship these messages, together with any included emoji, reactions, and URLs, to its servers to assist its AI craft an acceptable response. The corporate provides that it gained’t ship any messages with attachments, voice messages, and pictures however notes “picture captions and voice transcriptions could also be despatched.”

Google first rolled out E2EE on the app in 2020 and made it out there for group chats late final 12 months. Toggling on the characteristic means third events — not even Google — will see your messages. Whereas utilizing Magic Compose with E2EE will ship your messages to Google’s servers, the corporate maintains that it nonetheless can’t truly learn them.

Google spokesperson Justin Rende additional clarified to The Verge that “dialog information utilized by Magic Compose shouldn’t be retained” and that “prompt response outputs usually are not retained as soon as they’ve been offered to the consumer.” When you flip Magic Compose off, Google gained’t ship your messages to its servers.

You probably have entry to the characteristic, you’ll see a chat bubble subsequent to the app’s message composer. From there, you’ll be able to choose a prompt response after which proceed to rewrite the textual content utilizing varied preset types, like “chill,” “excited,” or “Shakespeare.” The characteristic solely appears to be out there with RCS messages for now, and there’s no phrase on when it’d help SMS / MMS.

Microsoft also rolled out a similar feature in its keyboard app, SwiftKey. This lets you choose the Bing icon throughout the app’s toolbar to compose textual content messages and emails, in addition to change the tone, format, and size of the prompt messages.