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

Google has finally started to roll out the beta of Magic Compose, its new Messages feature that uses AI to help you write text messages. However, as pointed out by Android Police, the feature comes with a pretty big caveat: it 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 (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 won’t send any messages with attachments, voice messages, and images but notes “image captions and voice transcriptions may be sent.”

Google first rolled out E2EE 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. While using Magic Compose with E2EE will send your messages to Google’s servers, the company maintains that it still can’t actually read them.

Google spokesperson Justin Rende further clarified to The Verge that “conversation data used by Magic Compose is not retained” and that “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 Google showed off at its I/O event earlier this month. According to Google, you can use the feature to reply to text messages using “stylized, suggested responses with the context of your messages.” The feature is currently rolling out to users in the Google Messages beta program.

If you have access to the feature, you’ll see a chat bubble next to the app’s message composer. From there, you can pick a suggested response and then continue to rewrite the text using various preset styles, like “chill,” “excited,” or “Shakespeare.” 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 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.