Google’s Magic Compose tool, which uses AI to help users personalize the tone of their texts with suggestions has gone live for select US users, Android Police reports.
Magic Compose, which was officially unveiled at Google’s I/O Conference earlier this month, uses Google’s Bard AI chatbot to help users initiate a chat or rewrite a message with seven different tones and styles.
As Google’s support page notes, those styles are: Remix, Excited, Chill, Shakespeare, Lyrical, Formal, and Short. Those styles are accessed by tapping the pencil icon which is found next to typed text in Google’s Messages app.
As Android Police states in its report, the feature is currently being prioritized for premium Google One subscribers in the US who have signed up to the Messages beta program on the Play Store. Google One subscribers were also granted first access this week to the beta rollout for Google’s new AI-based generative search, also announced at I/O, called Search Labs.
While in beta, Magic Compose is currently limited to users 18 years and older, and can only offer suggestions in English on Android phones (except Android Go) with US SIM cards. The feature is enabled by turning it on via the app’s Settings menu.
Before you use the AI feature, it’s worth being aware that up to 20 of your last end-to-end encrypted messages are unlocked and sent to Google’s servers for the generation of text and tonal suggestions.
On its support page, the tech giant says that it “discards the messages” after they’ve been used for text generation and adds that “messages with attachments, voice messages, and images aren’t sent to Google servers, but image captions and voice transcriptions may be sent.” Google affirms that no messages are sent to them when users are not using Magic Compose.
