Android Auto’s Touchscreen-Enabled Message Reply Feature Sounds Mostly Safe

Last Updated on December 3, 2021 by Nachiket Mhatre

According to the 2019 road safety statistics released by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, mobile phone-induced road fatalities increased by nearly 33 percent over the preceding year in India. Meanwhile, Google has announced a new Android Auto feature encouraging drivers to interact with touchscreens while replying to text messages.

Dubbed as Smart Reply, the new feature is a purportedly “smart” alternative to the existing recourse of responding to messages using voice dictation. Originally, incoming messages would be read out to the driver, which could then be replied solely using voice commands. The general idea being to stop drivers from taking their eyes off the road.

Going by the short demonstration shared by Google, Smart Reply allows drivers to briefly take their eyes off the road to read, comprehend, and decide which one of the AI generated replies is appropriate, before taking (hopefully) only one hand off the wheel to tap the most viable predetermined reply on the touchscreen.

Statistically speaking, the odds of a large animal or a small child wandering into the path of your vehicle during that short window of distraction are ridiculously low. Those are, nevertheless, much better odds compared to what Tesla drivers have to contend with. So, this feature probably might not pan out as terribly as one would imagine.

Moving onto Android Auto features that won’t kill you and/or other road users, Google is also proudly releasing the auto-launch option for the smart driving app.

True to its name, the nifty new feature automatically launches the dashboard interface as soon as it detects that the smartphone has been hooked up to the car. Additional UI features include an always-on play button located on the home screen that makes queuing up your favourite tunes a single tap affair.

The app’s integrated voice search is also being beefed up to allow drivers to start music playback by mentioning just the name of the artist or song. You no longer have to mention both those details along with the name of the music app, because the app will intuitively select the right song on the appropriate music app, and only prompt for clarifications in the rare case when the same song titles have multiple artists.

Google is expected to roll out these features to Android devices in the coming months, as no specific date has been provided as of this writing.