Google Messages continues to steadily improve. One of the bigger changes we’ve seen in recent times was the addition of Assistant-based suggestions in the context of your discussion. The next version of Messages adds chat reminders, allowing you to take action at a later time, or send further messages if you’re following/checking on someone regularly.
An attentive Android Police reader spotted the additional functionality in their last update. The implementation looks to be very similar to the snooze function that migrated from Inbox to Gmail.
Once your reminder time is reached, you’ll get a notification that you can snooze or open it to go straight to the message in question.
As of writing this article, the update for Messages 5.2 has not appeared on APK Mirror but it can’t be far away. If you’re super keen to try this keep an eye out for it there, or you can (try to) be patient and wait for the roll-out via the Play Store to your device.
Oh that’s a good feature! (being a poor immediate sms responder)