Google wants to save you time with a new text scanning feature on its Gboard keyboard

Google’s keyboard is currently undergoing some additions. Like this new feature, which will save you from having to navigate between several applications.

This may seem trivial, but the choice of keyboard on a smartphone is quite important. Each has its little differences that please some but not others, and the developers do not hesitate to add their own little personal touch to keep a warm place under the text fields of the majority.

Of course, Google has been offering its own application, Gboard, for many years, which has no shortage of arguments to increasingly convince its users.

Smile and insert

Have you ever come across a very original cocktail in a bar, and wanted to write down its ingredients to recreate it later? To do this, you can take a photo of the establishment’s menu, which risks taking up space on your device and in your image library. It is also possible to write it by hand, a more versatile method, but slower and more prone to errors.

Google has found the solution to combine the advantages of these two techniques: text recognition via Gboard, a functionality similar to that already found on Google Lens. It allows you to use the lens of your smartphone to aim at text and take a photo of it. The application then takes care of understanding the letters displayed, before asking the user to insert them into the text field in use.

If we know that the American company has been working on this functionality for several weeks, it is only just starting to arrive at end users. Like Mishaal Rahman on X (formerly Twitter), who gives us a glimpse of it on his Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.

An update that will save you time

Although this is a feature that duplicates what we already find on Lens, it still remains very useful. Indeed, the latter is not only intended for copying text, which can make the maneuver tedious. In addition, Google saves us from navigating between several applications, a significant time saving. However, the Mountain View firm is not inventing the wheel, since Samsung has already added such functionality to its own keyboard since One UI 5.

If you still don’t have access to the tool, don’t panic, you’re not alone. Google seems to be rolling it out gradually to stable versions of Gboard, so you’ll probably have to wait a bit before you can use it. In the meantime, you can always revisit the cocktails you already know. After all, there’s nothing like the classics.

Source : Android Police