How to Set Custom Quick Reply Messages on Apple Watch

Apple Watch offers quick and seamless communication methods, and one of the most used features for many users is the ability to instantly reply to inbound messages with quick pre-canned replies, emojis, or a dictated message. The quick replies in particular are very useful, and Apple Watch offers a variety of default replies for this purpose, but an even better solution is to customize your quick reply choices to better suit your needs and communication style.

To change the default message reply options to custom messages of your choosing, have the Apple Watch and paired iPhone handy.

Customize the Default Quick Replies to Messages on Apple Watch

1. Open the Apple Watch app on the paired iPhone and choose ‘My Watch’
2. Go to “Messages” and tap on “Default Replies”
3. Tap into any of the pre-canned responses in the Default Replies list and enter your own text
4. Repeat with the other default replies and exit out of the My Watch preferences when finished

The changes will sync to the Apple Watch quickly and you’ll be able to use them for future responses to inbound text messages and imessages.

Using Quick Replies on Apple Watch

1. When a new message arrives on Apple Watch, raise your wrist as usual then scroll down and tap on “Reply”
2. Choose the customized Quick Reply by tapping on it and send it as a response

These Quick Reply options are really useful and can be more than sufficient to handle responses to most inbound messages to the Apple Watch, at least until you can either use Siri to offer a full response, call the person back, or use Messages from iOS or a Mac to have a complete conversation.

Remember, you can always tap the microphone button to use voice to text and have a complete reply written out for you too, or even send a voice message like you can from iPhone, both of these features work very well on Apple Watch.

Apple has a nice demonstration video of how the quick reply messaging feature works on Apple Watch, embedded below:

A similar quick-reply feature exists on iPhone for responding to inbound calls with a quick message. Perhaps a future release of iOS will offer a similar quick-reply feature for all inbound messages in iOS, but for now iPhone and ipad users can use the notification response feature in conjunction with Quick Type in a similar manner.