Google has now turned on its RCS service in the US for all carriers inside of its Google Messages app. To turn on the service, users just need to update both the Google Messages and Carrier Services apps. The company has now announced a two new features to keep users safe from spammy or malicious SMS-bots.
The new features include ‘Verified SMS’ and ‘Real-time spam protection’. Both the features have been turned on inside of the app by default and cannot be turned off by the user.
With the ‘Verified SMS’ feature, Google will help users identify the authenticity of an SMS from a business. It will show the user the company’s name and logo in the chat window. The feature is currently rolling out to the US, India, Mexico, Brazil, UK, France, Philippines, Spain and Canada.
Branco Bradesco, Kayak, Payback, SoFi and 1 800-Flowers are a few brands that have signed up for the feature with Google.
The other feature is Real-time spam protection, which warns users of suspected spam messages. It also detects whether a link in the message might lead to an unsafe website. Google has added a report feature to complement the Real-time spam protection feature, which allows the users to report spam text messages and block the source from sending any more texts.
The Real-time spam protection is currently only rolling out in the US, however, the company has said that it will roll out this feature to other countries soon.