Brush up on Gboard’s latest tips and tricks

Today Gboard for Android is getting an upgrade. In addition to our continued efforts to improve typing quality with machine intelligence, this update brings new ways to get creative and cut down text time.

In the emoji search box, you can now tap the emoji handwriting icon to draw emoji directly onto the screen. Your drawing will automatically be recognized and show results for your favorite emoji.😎

To help you up your texts per minute, Gboard now includes phrase suggestions to predict what you plan to type next. For example, try typing “looking forward” and Gboard suggests “to seeing” or “to it” as you type. This is supported in English today and will be rolling out to more languages soon.

When you’re searching in the keyboard, we’ll now offer multiple results for you to browse through, making it easier to search and share in any app. In addition, on a card, you can click through to go to Maps, call a business, or watch a YouTube video. Just press the G or arrow->magnifying glass in the suggestion strip to start searching.

Finally, Gboard now supports more than 200 language varieties, and we’re also adding suggestions and gesture typing for Azerbaijani (Iran), Dhivehi, French (Belgium), Hawaiian, Maori and Samoan, and simple keyboards so you can type and text in Dzongkha, Ewe, Navajo, Tsonga, and K'iche'.

To test drive these updates to Gboard for Android, head to the Google Play Store and make sure you’re running the latest version of the app (version 6.3).