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Microsoft has dramatically improved the quality of its Android apps over the past two years, leading to the creation of high-quality Android apps such as Next Lock Screen and Microsoft Launcher.
SMS Organizer, the latest, is a text messaging service from Microsoft Garage, an initiative within the company that allows employees to work on projects that they are passionate about. The application takes advantage of machine learning to automatically sort messages according to the context. It comes with a range of customization options that makes it an attractive alternative to your current email application. SMS Organizer debuted last year, but was exclusive to the Indian market. After accumulating a million downloads, the application now travels to the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.
Before going into details, let's take a look at the creation of the application. SMS Organizer was developed by Microsoft Garage, based in Hyderabad, India. It is designed to solve the problems specific to the Indian market. Because the government requires two-factor authentication for all online transactions, customers are often inundated with one-time passwords (POTs) for everything from connecting to a mobile wallet to paying with a credit card.
SMS Organizer is designed to reduce clutter and provide a messaging experience that highlights useful information. Therefore, the main interface of the application is divided into four sections: texts, reminders, finances and offers. The callback function is particularly useful for me: it analyzes the information contained in the texts and creates files containing usable data. For flights, SMS Organizer will display the date and time, as well as the reservation number of the reservation. For invoices such as credit card bills, it will show the due date and the total amount owed. This feature is not new. Xiaomi has been using the same MIUI messaging application for a few years, but with SMS Organizer, you can use it on all devices.
The SMS tab is divided into four categories – personal, transactional, promotional and star-shaped – and SMS Organizer automatically sorts incoming messages into the appropriate section. The personal tab is what appears when you open the application, but you can change it to a transactional tab from the settings.
Notifications for promotional texts are disabled by default and, as a person receiving a lot of spam, it is one of the best features of SMS Organizer. If, for any reason, you want to enable notifications from the Promotion tab, you can do so from the settings. The application also comes with scanning gestures, to the Outlook. The default action for the left drag gesture is to mark a message as read, and dragging to the right opens the Move To dialog box. Of course, you can configure the actions for one or the other gesture from the settings. And oh, there is also a dark theme.
You can also define a message signature. SMS Organizer comes with rules for automatically deleting messages. For promotional tab messages and blocked messages, you can choose between a week, a month, or a year. The application will automatically delete the messages according to your choice. For OTPs, an additional option allows you to automatically delete messages longer than three days.
With reminders, automatic backups and a dark theme, you do not need another email application.
SMS Organizer contains many features that make it a robust email service, but one that has tipped to the application is its backup option. You'll be able to automatically save messages to Google Drive – the manual, daily, weekly, and monthly options – and restore them when transferring to a new device. The option is disabled by default, so you do not have to link your Drive account to SMS Organizer if you do not use the restore feature.
I spoke to Nikhil Verma, Senior Program Manager of Microsoft, who led the team that created SMS Organizer. He explained how the application was created, from an initial prototype hackathon to a full-fledged email client:
While smartphone penetration has grown by leaps and bounds in India, the number of users who use versatile phones is still incredibly high. This makes SMS the most inclusive way of spreading information in India today.
Nowadays, most commercial and governmental transactions trigger the sending of an SMS to confirm the service. In addition to these transactions, companies use SMS to send promotional SMS to Indian consumers. In layman's terms, the deluge of text messages that an average consumer receives daily creates a very complicated SMS inbox.
After talking with multiple users, it appeared that SMS management was largely disrupted by most of the SMS applications provided and that none of them met the needs of these Indian consumers. We created a prototype in an internal Hackathon and the response was phenomenal. We were trying to solve a daily problem faced by mobile phone users in India and the enthusiasm generated by our prototype motivated us to put them on the market.
Because SMS Organizer relies on machine learning to sort messages, confidentiality issues are needed. Verma has confirmed that the service uses text classification on the device, since the data never goes to a Microsoft server:
SMS Organizer uses machine learning templates to categorize SMS messages into personal, promotional, and transactional categories. In the transactional category, the template identifies a class of messages that can be processed via reminders and analyzes them to obtain the important details needed to trigger and display reminders.
From the beginning, we took users' privacy very seriously and designed the application based on the fundamental principle that SMS is a very private entity for a user. The user must have absolute control over the way he manages and backs up his SMS. As a result, all data classification is done on the device and no SMS content is ever uploaded to the cloud.
The ability to transparently back up and restore Drive messages, combined with a robust set of features – including callback and intelligent text sorting – makes SMS Organizer the best messaging application I've ever had. used for a long time. The interface itself is clean and has no clutter, the application offers a multitude of customization possibilities and you can fine tune the settings to customize the best messaging available on Android.
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