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 function that makes use of AI that will help you write textual content messages. Nevertheless, as identified by Android Police, the function comes with a reasonably large caveat: it is going to ship as much as “20 earlier messages” to Google’s servers to generate recommendations — even if you happen to’re utilizing RCS with end-to-end encryption (E2EE).

Google outlines these situations on its Magic Compose help web 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 applicable response. The corporate provides that it received’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 function 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 isn’t retained” and that “steered response outputs should not retained as soon as they’ve been offered to the consumer.” When you flip Magic Compose off, Google received’t ship your messages to its servers.

In case you have entry to the function, you’ll see a chat bubble subsequent to the app’s message composer. From there, you may decide a steered response after which proceed to rewrite the textual content utilizing numerous preset kinds, like “chill,” “excited,” or “Shakespeare.” The function solely appears to be out there with RCS messages for now, and there’s no phrase on when it would help SMS / MMS.

Microsoft additionally rolled out the same function 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 steered messages.