Wear Responses Adds Customizable Canned Text Messages To Android Wear

Wear Responses Adds Customizable Canned Text Messages to Android Wear

BY GreenBot Staff

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Published 13 Jan 2015

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Here’s another Android Wear app that ought to use as feature fodder. It’s called Wear Responses, which lets you send custom canned SMS responses from your smartwatch. With the free Android app installed, Wear Responses will notify your watch when a text message comes in. You can then use the reply function to choose from three custom responses and those that include by default. A $3 upgrade lets you craft unlimited answers. It adds a few extra features, including the ability to send new canned messages. Not just replies straight from the watch.
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As Android Police points out, a previous version of Wear Responses required a rooted phone to work, but that’s no longer the case. Version 2.0 of Wear Responses should work with any Android phone. It supports all SMS applications, including Hangouts, Messaging, and third-party options.

Why this matters: Although Android Wear includes a handful of canned responses by default, there’s no way to customize them. Most of the enclosed messages are terse responses such as OK or Thanks. Wear Responses adds enough flexibility, so you don’t struggle with speech-to-text in a crowded room.

Rapid Response

When you first launch the Wear Responses phone app. It offers to scan your text message history for the phrases you use most frequently. You can add them as canned responses with a tap before creating your own. Once you have a list of answers, you can delete them with a swipe. Edit them with a tap or clear them all through the top-right menu option.

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Wear Responses finds your most frequent responses and adds them automatically.

Things get a little trickier on the watch itself. Wear Responses creates a separate notification on your smartwatch. Thereby duplicating any messages you already get from your default SMS app. To stop this, you’ll have to block your main SMS app’s notifications from appearing on Android Wear.

When a text comes in, you can respond by swiping the reply button. Then swiping down to choose a canned response from the list. By default, you’ll still see Android’s primary canned responses, followed by your custom ones. But you can go into the phone app’s settings to hide the replies or arrange everything alphabetically. Unfortunately, there’s no way to have your custom responses appear first.

Wear Responses isn’t the only option for extending Android Wear’s SMS functionality. Another app called Coffee adds even more flexibility through branching conversation trees. Both approaches have their merits; Wear Responses is more straightforward. While Coffee increases the odds that you’ll never have to fall back on speech-to-text. Either way, more powerful text responses should definitely be on Androids’ to-do list for future versions of Android Wear.