New Gboard beta improves start-up speed, reduces keyboard latency, and more

Gboard is one of the most popular keyboards on Android, thanks to its predictive text suggestions and swipe-typing capabilities, as well as feature integration with other Google services. The app has steadily gained features over the months and years, with some noteworthy additions being Emoji Kitchen, direct copy-pasting images into social media apps, GIF suggestion and sentence completion, and Extra Tall and Extra Short keyboard heights. When apps consistently gain a lot of features, they do take a hit in its performance, especially with increased startup times to account. The newest Gboard beta takes cognizance of this creep up, as the release attempts to improve the start-up speed of the app and reduce the keyboard latency.

The latest Gboard beta also continues the trend of adding new features, as it has now introduced word prediction and spelling correction for handwriting input, although this is limited to US-English only for now. Tibetan language users now also get a layout for handwriting input. While one can debate on who would prefer handwriting input over traditional typing, it can come in handy in edge case scenarios, so it is good to see Google still focusing on this area.

The complete changelog for the new Gboard beta is as below:

• Improvements to the keyboard latency and startup-time
• Enables keyboard borders for tablets
• Adds support for next word prediction and spelling correction for handwriting keyboards for faster typing. (En-US only)
• Adds support for handwriting layout for Tibetan

This particular release has not made its way to APKMirror just yet, but it will eventually. So, for now, if you are interested in getting the beta, you would need to enroll for the same from the Google Play Store. Alternatively, you can stick with the stable release as these features will eventually make their way to the stable branch too.

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Gboard - the Google Keyboard (Free, Google Play) →

Source: AndroidPolice

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