Following Google’s initial plan to roll out Smart Reply to Project Fi several months back, some T-Mobile users are now reporting that the feature is rolling out for Android Messages on the network. It’s worth bringing up that even if the feature is rolling out, that doesn’t mean it will hit every device on the network and isn’t necessarily confined to T-Mobile. For those who may not be aware, the Smart Reply feature in question is one that has been around for quite some time already in both Google Allo and Gmail. In the shortest possible terms, it is a machine learning-based tool that generates automatic replies based on the context of a received message and a user’s own preferred mannerisms. In general, it works fairly well and its inclusion in Android Messages means that users can spend less time typing when a short reply is all that’s needed.
There are two devices running on T-Mobile’s network which repeatedly show up in at least one Reddit forum pertaining to the topic. That was created by a user posting under the handle “LinkofHyrule” and, more specifically, those include the Samsung Galaxy S9 and the OnePlus 6. Presumably, the Galaxy S9 Plus is a close enough match to its smaller sibling that the feature would be showing up there as well. Moreover, aside from its initial launch on Project Fi, there’s no reason to think that Google’s Smart Reply would be limited to those two handsets – let alone to a single carrier such as T-Mobile. So it’s entirely possible that the feature is undergoing testing and simply hasn’t been spotted elsewhere just yet.
Bearing all of that in mind, if this is just a test rollout, users shouldn’t be too surprised if it doesn’t hit their own device for quite a while longer. Tests of new app features can take weeks or months to complete before a company is satisfied with the results and rolls them out more widely. In the meantime, Smart Reply will almost certainly arrive at some point over the course of the next year, as it has been spotted several times over the past several months. So users are just going to have to be patient.