The Little Buttons Under the Chat: How Suggested Replies Actually Work
You have probably tapped one without thinking about it. Under the message box there are a few small suggestions — Tell me more, Be honest with me, Make me laugh — and they are easy to read as filler, the sort of generic autocomplete every chat app bolts on. They are not. There are 504 of them, every one written by hand, split evenly across all nine roles, and the set you are shown depends on how deep into the conversation you already are. This is the feature nobody asks about, so here is what is actually happening down there.
Nine Roles, Five States, 504 Chips
The structure is a grid. Every one of the nine roles has its own complete set of suggestions, and each role's set is divided into five conversation states. That's forty-five distinct pools, and they are populated evenly: fifty-six chips per role, nine roles, 504 in total.
The evenness is deliberate and worth pausing on. The Healer did not get a thinner set than the Best Friend because grief is harder to write buttons for. The Guru's set is exactly as deep as the Coach's. Whichever companion you spend your time with, the same amount of work went into what it offers you.
Why per-role writing matters more than it sounds
A single shared set of suggestions would be cheaper and would also be wrong, because “keep going” means something different depending on who you are talking to. Get real with me for a second belongs to the Best Friend. It would be a strange thing to say to the Healer, who was never being unreal with you. The chips are role-specific because the natural next thing to say is role-specific, and a generic set would quietly flatten nine distinct companions into one.
The Five States, and What Moves You Between Them
The state is not a mood the system is guessing at. It is a simple, honest count of how many times your companion has replied in this conversation — which turns out to be a decent proxy for how far in you are.
Opening
The very start. Suggestions that get a conversation moving at all — low-stakes, easy to tap, no assumption that you know what you want to talk about yet.
Warming Up
A few exchanges in. Suggestions that pull on a thread rather than start one: tell me more, say more about that, keep going.
Deepening
The conversation has found its subject. Suggestions get more direct and more willing to ask for something real.
Intensity
The heaviest stretch. This is where the suggestions are most careful, because this is where a badly-worded button would be most intrusive.
Cooldown
The long tail of a conversation that has already done its work. Suggestions here are about landing gently rather than digging further.
The thresholds are tight on purpose. You are in opening only for the first reply or so, through warming up across the next few, and the conversation reaches intensity well before most people would guess. That reflects something true about how these conversations actually go: they get real faster than small talk does, and suggestions that were appropriate at message two are conspicuously wrong by message ten.
The Best Detail: A Slot Reserved for Changing the Subject
Here is the part we are genuinely pleased with, and the part almost nobody notices.
Once you reach deepening, intensity, or cooldown, the system stops filling every suggestion slot from the same pool. It sets one aside for a different kind of chip entirely — internally these are marked as pivots, and there are 135 of them, distributed evenly across exactly those three deeper states. A pivot is a way out. Somewhere to go that is not further down.
The reason is straightforward. A conversation that has gone somewhere heavy can be hard to leave, and the difficulty is often social rather than emotional: you do not want to seem like you are shutting the other person down, so you answer one more question, and then another. A companion cannot be offended — but the instinct is human and it carries over anyway. So when things get deep, one of your options is always somewhere else, offered without you having to ask for it and without having to explain yourself.
Only in the deeper states, and only ever one
You will not see pivots in opening or warming up, because a conversation two messages old does not need an escape hatch — offering one would just be strange. And the system reserves exactly one slot, never more. The point is to leave a door visible, not to keep suggesting you walk through it.
Tap to Send, or Tap to Fill
There is a setting here that changes the feature's character completely, and it is worth knowing about because the default suits some people and not others.
By default, chips send immediately. You tap, the message goes. That is the right behavior when the suggestion is exactly what you meant — it makes replying nearly frictionless, which matters on a phone and matters more when you are tired.
The alternative is fill the input instead. Tapping a chip drops the text into the message box and leaves it there, so you can edit it, add to it, or delete half of it before sending. If you have ever tapped a suggestion and immediately wished you had softened it, this is the setting you want. Your choice is remembered.
Small Touches You Would Only Notice by Their Absence
It remembers what it just showed you
Recently-shown chips are tracked and skipped, so the same three suggestions don't reappear every turn. Without this the feature would feel mechanical within about five messages.
The selection is randomized
Chips are drawn from the state's pool rather than shown in a fixed order, so two conversations in the same role and state don't feel like reruns of each other.
There is always a fallback
If a companion doesn't have a set for the current state — a custom companion, say — it falls back to that role's opening set, then to a general set. You never get an empty row.
No Tier Gating, and That Is on Purpose
All 504 chips are available on every plan, including free. There is no premium suggestion set, no locked pool for the deeper states, nothing withheld from the Free tier's three roles.
This one is easy to explain. Suggested replies exist to help people who are stuck — opening a conversation they don't know how to start, continuing one that has gone somewhere hard, or finding a way out of it. Charging for that would mean charging people for the moments they are least able to manage on their own, which is the opposite of what the feature is for. It is a small thing to give away and it would be a genuinely bad thing to sell.
What They Are Not
Two honest limits, because a feature article that only lists strengths isn't worth much.
The chips are not generated for you. They are hand-written and chosen by role and conversation depth — not composed in the moment from what you just said. That is a deliberate trade: hand-written suggestions are consistent, fast, and never produce something strange at a bad moment, but they cannot be about the specific thing you are discussing. They know roughly where you are in a conversation, not what is in it.
They are a starting point, not a script. The best conversations here are the ones where a chip gets you moving and then you stop using them — which is exactly why the fill-the-input mode exists, and why nothing nudges you toward tapping rather than typing. If you find yourself only ever tapping, that is worth noticing; the suggestions are scaffolding, and scaffolding is supposed to come down.
For the wider picture of how a conversation is held together over time, how memory works is the companion piece — the chips handle the next message, memory handles everything before it. And if the roles themselves are new to you, the nine companions is where to start.
Never Face a Blank Message Box
Nine roles, five conversational states, and something sensible to tap in every one of them. Free to start.
Open InnerHaven