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

Google has finally started rolling out the beta version of Magic Compose, its new Messages feature that uses AI to help you write text messages. However, as pointed out android policeThe feature comes with a pretty big caveat: it will send up to “old 20 messages” to Google’s servers to generate suggestions, even if you’re using RCS with end-to-end encryption (E2EE).

Google outlines these conditions on its Magic Compose support page, noting 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. The company adds that it will not send any messages with attachments, voice messages and images, but notes that “image captions and voice transcripts can be sent.”

Google first launched E2EE on the app in 2020 and made it available for group chats late last year. Activating the feature means that third parties, not even Google, will see your messages. While using Magic Compose with E2EE willpower sends your messages to Google’s servers, the company claims that it still can’t read them.

Google spokesman Justin Rende further clarified to the edge that “conversation data used by Magic Compose is not retained” and that “suggested response results are not retained once they have been provided to the user.” Once you disable Magic Compose, Google will not send 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 response, and then continue retyping the text using various preset styles, such as “calm,” “excited,” or “Shakespeare.” The feature only seems to be available with RCS messages for now, and there’s no word on when it might be supported for 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 suggested messages.