Google Messages will make it easier to react to received messages more quickly and easily. Instead of a long press on a text, it will now be enough to double tap to display emojis. Practical !
With more than a billion monthly active users, Google Messages has established itself as one of the flagship SMS, MMS and RCS applications. And, for this, the Web giant drew inspiration from other popular instant messaging services, such as WhatsApp or Signal. From now on, messages can be accompanied by photos, high quality videos, links, or even emojis. It is also possible to create group conversations and even activate typing indicators which indicate when the correspondents are writing. And Google doesn’t plan to stop there to improve its app. While the company is making it possible to add text to caption images you send, it is also introducing a new way to respond to messages. According to 9to5google, the latest beta version of the application, 20240208_00_RC00, contains several lines of code referring to a “double_tap_to_react” function, which would therefore be in preparation. As its name suggests, it allows you to react to a message by tapping it twice.
Double tap Google Messages: a menu of emojis to react faster
Currently, to react to a message in Google Messages, you have to long-press it, which brings up a small pop-up window containing seven emojis. A system that is not necessarily to everyone’s taste. However, the long press also allows you to open the menu allowing you to copy a message, delete it or put it as a favorite. It would therefore be logical to separate these two ways of acting to obtain more intuitive operation.
From now on, users would no longer have to long press on a message, but could simply do a quick double tap to open the emoji reactions menu. A bit like what we already find on Instagram messaging or on Telegram. We just hope that it will be possible to be able to choose the emoji to send by default. At the moment, it’s unclear when Google will release the “double-tap-to-react” feature to the general public – if it ever rolls it out, it could just be an experiment.
In addition to this new way of reacting to messages, 9to5Google also discovered something new regarding the generative AI functions of Google Messages. Indeed, we already knew that the Internet giant had planned to integrate its Bard chatbot into the messaging application to write messages, translate texts, and even identify images. However, as the company has decided to rename Bard (see our article), the application code now no longer mentions Bard, but Gemini. It’s coming to fruition little by little!