This has been a huge year for RCS. Not only has its userbase through Google Messages grown as the feature has rolled out to users worldwide, but Apple was successfully pressured into agreeing to adopt RCS in the future—with the new messaging standard to roll out at some point in 2024. Right after this massive win, Google is now unveiling some of its latest improvements and additions to RCS.

Google Messages is celebrating a significant milestone with over one billion monthly active users now using the app and the RCS standard, and to celebrate it, Google is adding a bunch of improvements to Messages. There are a total of seven new features Android users can now check out. The biggest of these is probably “Photomoji,” which enables users to transform photos into reactions using on-device Google AI, letting you cut out subjects from photos and use them as reactions for messages. We also have “Voice Moods,” which adds emotional nuances to voice messages (which have also been improved with a higher bitrate and sampling rate), with nine different dynamic backgrounds expressing what a voice message is trying to convey before it’s even played.

There are also new iPhone-like “Screen Effects” that infuse messages with vibrant, full-screen animations, with certain messages showing certain animations. “Custom Bubbles” lets you customize different chats with different bubble colors and backgrounds, while “Reaction Effects” makes the process of reacting to a message a bit more dynamic by adding animations to reactions. There are also animated emoji, similar to Telegram, as well as profiles to change how you appear in the Messages app and across the Google ecosystem. That last feature is more of a new addition to Google accounts, rather than something specific to Messages.

It should be noted that these new features are part of Google Messages, and they might not work when texting people over SMS or people using iPhones. We still don’t have a great idea about what RCS functionality will be available on iPhones. If you have Google Messages installed and want to try out the new features, keep an eye out for the app update.

Source: Google