With an Apple Watch Series 4 you may have more screen space, but replying to messages is still not convenient. Fortunately, there are standard answers that are easy to personalize.
Personal canned responses on your Apple Watch
In theory it sounds quite handy: without taking your iPhone out of your pocket, just tap a message or email with your Apple Watch. Yet the screen of the watch remains too small for that, and it is mostly fiddly work.
Apple knows that too, which is why watchOS comes with canned replies for Mail and Messages. These are only very general answers such as ‘Okay’ and ‘Thank you’. Would you rather quickly send a more extensive or more personal message back? You can, because you can easily adjust these standard answers. We show you how to do this.
Customize canned responses for Messages
- Open the Watch app on your iPhone;
- Go to the ‘My Watch’ tab;
- Open the ‘Messages’ menu and tap ‘Canned replies’;
- To edit an answer, tap it and enter your custom default answer.
If you have set different personal standard answers in this way, you can delete unnecessary messages if necessary. You do this by swiping them from left to right, or clicking ‘Edit’ in the top right corner. Then tap the red icon. Via ‘Edit’ you can also determine the order, and therefore put the most frequently used answers at the top.
Change default replies for Mail
To change the default replies for your Mail, you basically do the same as with Messages. Because these are two different apps, you have to personalize these answers separately. You can do this by going to ‘Mail’ in the Watch app and in the same way under ‘Standard replies’ to edit or delete the responses.
When you now receive an email or message and tap ‘Reply’, you will see the personalized standard replies. This way you can answer easily and more appropriately, without having to type on the small screen of your Apple Watch.
Come up with personal answers
If you are not yet used to using the canned answers on your Apple Watch, it can be difficult to come up with your own answers. It is useful if they can be used with different types of mails and messages. In that case, first use the preset standard answers for a while. This way you will automatically know better what you are missing in these comments.