Android’s new generative AI can reply to your texts and dream up wallpaper

Generative AI is all the rage — and Google has found two new ways to put the tech in the palm of your hand.

First, it’s announcing Magic Compose, a new feature in Android’s default Messages app that’ll let you respond to texts with auto-suggested responses “based on the content of your messages” so they sound like you, or pull a Grammarly and make them sound more “concise” and “professional,” or even imitate a famous style.

Me? I can’t wait to put it to work on those pig butchering scammers who keep pretending they’ve got the “wrong number.” The beta’s coming this summer.

Second, as part of a Pixel-exclusive next month, Google’s adding generative AI wallpaper where “you can answer suggested prompts to describe your ultimate creative vision” thanks to “Google’s text-to-image diffusion model.” It’s like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, but just for a single spot on your phone. Here’s hoping it’s good and we can easily yank the images for other uses, too.

Google also says it’s got a new flavor of “cinematic wallpaper” that “uses on-device machine learning networks to transform your favorite photos into stunning 3D images” that “come to life when you unlock or tilt your device.” (I’m quoting heavily throughout because there’s so little additional text in the official blog post that I don’t see much of a point in summarizing it for you.)

None of these are particularly new ideas, but as the famous William Gibson quote goes: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” There are a lot of opportunities to try generative AI, but some of the best are moderately, if not heavily, paywalled, and it’s nice to have another in the palm of your hand.

More customization will apparently be a big theme of Android 14 when it arrives later this year, by the way. You’ll also be able to “customize your lock screen with new shortcuts and beautifully crafted clocks” and apply a monochrome (black, white, gray) color palette “across your entire phone experience.” There will be emoji wallpaper, too.

It’s all a tiny glimpse of the Android ecosystem post-Android 13 — because the company tells us it’s not planning to make a big deal of Android 14 today.