Texting has become a common and very popular method of communicating with friends. Shooting off a quick text is much quicker and easier than calling, and it’s possible to text while distracted by other tasks.

Of course, those other tasks sometimes need to take priority. Texting while driving can be dangerous, and texting at work is often frowned upon, particularly at businesses where most employees interact directly with customers. Fortunately, the Auto SMS app for Android makes texting possible even when you’re not available.

Auto Reply

Arguably the app’s most popular feature, Auto Reply is the first option on the Auto SMS menu. What separates Auto SMS from most autoreply apps is the use of profiles. Each individual profile contains specific autoreply settings, and can be turned on or off whenever you’d like.

Let’s say you’re unable to text while driving or at work. When you hop in your car you could turn on your driving profile, which is active for an hour (the length of your commute) and informs those who text you that you’re driving and can’t respond.

Once you arrive at work, however, you can switch to your work profile. It lasts eight hours and gives those who text you a work number where you can be reached in case of an emergency. Not everyone should have your work number however, so you should restrict this text message to those who are in your contacts.

The use of profiles is what makes Auto SMS better than most other autoreply apps, which usually require that users input a new reply every time the autoreply is set and often have less tools for determining who does and doesn’t receive your automated reply.

Scheduling & Instant Texts

Sending replies is great, but also obviously reactive. If no one texts you, they’ll receive nothing in return. That works if you only need to let friends know why you’re out of touch, but what if you need to remind your roommate that rent is due today?

Scheduling makes that possible. Using Auto SMS it’s possible to input a specific text message and schedule it to be sent at any time you’d like. The message can be sent once or at set intervals (hourly, daily, weekly, etc) and even better, it’s possible to limit the recurrence to a specific number of repetitions.

What if you know you need to send a text, but don’t know exactly when? Don’t worry - this app still has you covered. The instant feature lets you input texts that can be sent to a specific contact just by touching send. Auto SMS saves the texts as well, so they can be sent more than once.

Read It Aloud

One final tool that may be of interest is Reader. This is a text-to-speech feature that can be turned on or off at will. Once turned on, the app will automatically cut in and read the incoming texts aloud, even if you are using a third-party SMS messaging app.

As with the other features of Auto SMS, scheduling options are available, making it possible to turn on text-to-speech only at pre-determined times. This is of course helpful when driving, since you’ll be able to receive messages without taking your eyes off the road.

Conclusion

Auto SMS provides a boatload of functionality and can make texting possible even when you’re not available to receive or send messages. Better still, the app is easy to learn thanks to an interface that’s straightforward and has clearly labeled features.

This app is available for free with ad support. A paid version without ads and a text backup feature is available for $1.92. You’ll need Android 2.1 or newer to run this app, and the app is known to be incompatible with most task killers.

Let us know in the comments how you like Auto SMS or if you prefer an alternative app.  Do you think apps like these are useful?