Gboard May Soon Gain Hands-Free Voice Typing on Pixel Phones
Aug. 10, 2020According to an APK teardown by9to5Google, Gboard may soon let users chat hands-free. Triggering the feature, however,requires tapping on the mic buttonpresent to the top right corner of the virtual keyboard.
When you’re using the feature, Google Assistant’s light bar will appear at the bottom portion to represent and visualize speech patterns. This behavior hints that the new hands-free typing experience will probably be limited to the next-gen Assistant. Google Assistant with compact UI is alsotesting the light bar, though.
Moreover, Google teased the feature on the next-gen Assistant at Google I/O ’19. In the demonstration, the feature was used to compose an email on Gmail app. If the feature is limited to next-gen Assistant, most of the Android users will miss out on it.
It is worth noting thatGoogle has not started testing the new hands-free voice typingin beta. For now, you will have to wait to get your hands on this feature. It will be interesting to see if the software giant manages to add this neat feature in both Pixel and non-Pixel phones.
Featured Image Courtesy: 9to5Google
Subin writes about consumer tech, software, and security. He secretly misses the headphone jack while pretending he’s better off with the wireless freedom.
