By Chethan Rao
Publication Date: 2026-06-06 13:55:00
The Smart Replies feature in Google Messages has remained largely unchanged since its 2018 release. That was until earlier this year, when we learned about the Messages app working on a Tap to edit toggle in settings, designed to prevent accidental taps on the row of auto-generated replies.
A couple of months later, we saw this evolve into a single toggle to switch between Tap to send (default behavior) and Tap to draft that would add the suggestion to the compose box rather than sending it as a message right away.
Now, the folks at 9to5Google have come across what appears to be the final iteration of this Smart Replies enhancement. Tap to send and Tap to draft have been converted to radio buttons, thereby eliminating the toggle-based activation we saw in the previous implementation.
This upgrade is reportedly live in version 20260522_00_RC00 (stable) of Google Messages, though I’m not seeing it on my Pixel device just yet. When available, you should find the Tap to draft…
