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.

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.