Google has been recently introducing quite a few fun additions to Gboard, making texting fun and quirky with your friends. Not all the additions cater to the fun side though, as the grammar checker has the potential to be very useful in official settings, catching your spelling blunders before you potentially embarrass yourself in a formal setting.
The latest addition, which definitely leans on the fun side of life, comes in the form of a magic wand and some emoji.
First reported by 9to5Google, a few Gboard users have reported the occasional appearance of a wand where the mic icon usually sits on Gboard. When you tap the wand, it will fill your text field with a few emojis that are relevant to what you are typing.
In an older description of the feature, Google instructed users to “Tap the emojify key to add emojis within a sentence or replace all text with emojis”.
It definitely makes it easier to add emojis to what you are typing, potentially avoiding those mildly frustrating times when you want to find a specific emoji, but you just can’t seem to locate it no matter how hard you try.
The feature is still not yet widely available to all Gboard users but, according to 9to5Google‘s tinkering, tapping the wand icon once will populate a series of emoji after your text. However, tapping it twice will place emoji in between the corresponding words.
Another fun Gboard feature that has been recently introduced is the custom stickers. The custom sticker works by Gboard automatically figuring out what you are typing, then automatically creating a custom sticker for you to use instead of the plain text.
For instance, when typing “Happy birthday Ashley”, the Gboard will figure out it’s a birthday wish and create a custom birthday sticker for Ashley that you can use. It is quite a handy little trick that is bound to create a smile or two for your loved ones.
The emojify feature and the custom stickers currently only support the English language in Gboard with no word whether support for other languages will be rolled out in the future.
