Message app generating reply text based on conversation

[Sprax8]

As the title indicates, my text message app is generating responses based on the conversation. I am NOT using message+ I am using message (without the plus). I am using an HTC 10 on Verizon's network. It was almost impossible to find this phone! But anyway, this is really creepy but also kind of awesome. I would ask if anyone else has had this happen to them, but I'm pretty sure I would have seen something about "The new text messaging app that now types responses for you!", which I haven't while searching through the forums. So ... what's happening?!

 

[NightAngel79]

As the title indicates, my text message app is generating responses based on the conversation. I am NOT using message+ I am using message (without the plus). I am using an HTC 10 on Verizon's network. It was almost impossible to find this phone! But anyway, this is really creepy but also kind of awesome. I would ask if anyone else has had this happen to them, but I'm pretty sure I would have seen something about "The new text messaging app that now types responses for you!", which I haven't while searching through the forums. So ... what's happening?!

Swiftkey has been doing that for a while, suggesting words based on what you start typing at least.

When you say 'types responses for you' what d o you mean? You have seen this behavior? Or just heard someone say that?

It wouldn't be the message app doing that for you, more dependent on the keyboard.

 

[Sprax8]

To be more clear, I will type out parts of my conversations:

My friend wrote:

"I want to go into these interviews knowing that we might not have our chorus teacher at the end. I hope [redacted] is okay with that. If none of them fit I want to keep looking."

I got the chime notifying me of a new text message, and when I opened my message app, the following text was sitting there waiting for me to hit send:

"Don't. You came to the right person. I really don't like to toot my own horn, but "

To be perfectly clear, I did NOT type any of the preceding text; it had been generated for me by some mysterious source. Maybe it's some new HTC 10 predictive response, or maybe our friends at the NSA hacked my phone. Who knows? It's funny that my friend was talking about the interviews we were attending in search of a new choir teacher at our school, but my phone's auto text response assumed that I was going to be an interviewee!

Another friend wrote:

"Hey, do you think I can have you pick up food the day of the wedding? I was thinking of getting catered affair sandwiches, and can give you my credit card the night before"

My phone thought I should respond with:

"I know, it's so weird to say wife after so many years. "

I am probably the least emotional person that I know. I would never willingly type anything like that above. What's amazing is that while most people use a single space after a period, I never broke my habit of double spacing at the end of a sentence, as you can see in this forum. My friends appear to use a single space, but if you look closely, you will notice that the automatically generated messages for me use double spaces.

In order to scientifically observe what my phone would do next, my wife wrote:

"Are you [redacted]"

And my phone decided to respond:

"[redacted] is apparently having an Applebee 's"

To be very clear, I have not made any mistakes in retyping these responses. There was a noticeable space between Applebee and the apostrophe s.

Sadly, my phone has only done this on the three separate occasions listed above. I almost wish this happened every time someone texted me. At least then I could see if tinkering with different settings would affect it. The only link between the three conversations where this occurred is that I had not sent or received a text from them within the past 24 hours. This makes it much more difficult to perform controlled experiments with changing the settings.

 

[lunatic59]

That is truly bizarre.

I've got a thought, hair-brained though it may be ... have you enabled the phone (Google Now) to listen for spoken commands? Is it possible that the phone is recording snippets of your normal conversations and putting them in the text input box so when you go to reply to a text it's there already?

You might want to try a different text client like Hangouts to see if the pattern continues. Then we'll now if it's the app or something else.

 

[Sprax8]

I don't think any voice activated commands are active on my phone. I just now tried talking to it the way they do in Sci-Fi movies like, "Phone on ... Open email ... Send text ... Google now ... Siri, what's the weather ... Cortana, order flowers" and it didn't respond. Also, I never would have verbally spoken any of those responses, let alone type them out. I really don't want to set up Hangouts at the moment. I didn't want to set up Message+, but we did that at the store just so we could go in and see if "auto reply" was activated, which it wasn't. Then I went back and made Message (without the plus) my default again. Also, this is a rare event that hasn't happened since Saturday. I wish I could recreate it more often.

 

[lunatic59]

I would think if predictive replies were enabled, they'd try to insert a reply for every text.

Other than the punctuation, does any of the text ring any bells? Like something you may have copied to the clipboard or typed in another text or email?

 

[Sprax8]

I have never copied anything to clipboard yet on this new phone. I would copy things often in the notes app from my previous phone, the HTC One M8, but nothing even remotely related to these generated texts. These texts seem to be generated by some program that reads the conversation. I say this because the first two seemed like they may have been written by a mysterious hacker, but the third one wasn't even grammatically close to anything a human would write. I say that a program must be reading the conversation because the first one was clearly a response to the word "interviews" and the phrase "I want to keep looking", the second one was based entirely on the word "wedding", and the third used a name and location that we had discussed several times months ago but not recently.

I will certainly update this immediately if it happens again. Have you ever heard of anything like this? The Best Buy Mobile store was totally geeking out over this, saying they knew about auto reply such as "Away from the office" or "On vacation", but this is totally different. Is there such a thing as predictive relies, which would be different than auto reply (the same reply given to anyone who emails or texts) or predictive text (as in single words based on one or more letters, or even predicting the next word in a sentence)?

 

[dontpanicbobby]

So weird. Just ignore the suggestions.

 

[lunatic59]

The closest thing I could find was this

https://litmus.com/blog/google-smart-reply-how-it-works

But that looks like it's only for inbox, not texts.

 

[NightAngel79]

What keyboard are you using? Stock HTC? Swiftkey?

Hangouts can be a pain, but you could try Google Messenger, I find it to be supireor in almost every way, just to see if it still happens.

If you can't recreate it reliably, then it is hard to troubleshoot obviously. I would try different combos of keyboard and message app to see if you can isolate when it happens.

And if you are still not satisfied, just factory reset and see if/when it happens again.

 

[Sprax8]

I found Fluenty or Talkey - I'm not sure if they are the same thing or if the former is the company and the latter is the app - which seems to do something very similar. Some of the differences are mine doesn't give me a choice of several different three-word reply options, mine appears to have parsed through the entire conversation looking for key words rather than just the most recent text, and mine is not an app intended for a smart watch. Maybe the technology is out there. I'm just curious why we haven't seen more of this before I posted here.

http://lifehacker.com/talkey-generates-smart-replies-to-text-messages-sends-1756059641

Btw, I am using everything stock HTC. At least, I haven't tampered with anything aside from the ringtones and such. I just got my phone recently, and this craziness happened before I had even customized all the different notification sounds. On a side note, I can't seem to get the stock SMS to recognize Zedge downloaded notification sounds. I'm sure it's just a matter of plugging my phone into an actual computer and looking to see if maybe the Zedge sounds are a different audio type than the stock notification sounds. It's weird that I can set the ringtone, general notification sound, and separate email notification sounds all to the downloaded Zedge ringtones and sounds, but SMS is fighting it by just defaulting back to whatever the general notification sound is.

 

[NightAngel79]

On a side note, I can't seem to get the stock SMS to recognize Zedge downloaded notification sounds. I'm sure it's just a matter of plugging my phone into an actual computer and looking to see if maybe the Zedge sounds are a different audio type than the stock notification sounds. It's weird that I can set the ringtone, general notification sound, and separate email notification sounds all to the downloaded Zedge ringtones and sounds, but SMS is fighting it by just defaulting back to whatever the general notification sound is.

You can set the SMS ringtone different from the general notification, but I always thoughts the general ringtone superseded the SMS settings. Did you change it in Messages>Notifications? Mine just mirrors the general tone I set (from zedge), but I've never purposely tried to change it.

 

[tube517]

Slightly off topic but Allo is supposed to have something similar (called "smart replies", not sarcastic )

 

[lunatic59]

You can set the SMS ringtone different from the general notification, but I always thoughts the general ringtone superseded the SMS settings. Did you change it in Messages>Notifications? Mine just mirrors the general tone I set (from zedge), but I've never purposely tried to change it.

I thought it was the other way around ... individual app/contact settings overrode the general notification sounds.

 

[NightAngel79]

I thought it was the other way around ... individual app/contact settings overrode the general notification sounds.

It seems to be different on each HTC phone. Last couple I had to set general tone, then go to message app and set tone there as well. The 10 wasn't like that, messaging app took general setting without me doing it manual