Google’s in-house mobile keyboard app, Gboard, has consistently been ranked as one of the most feature-rich tools of its kind out there. The company is now adding more functional flair to it by building an AI-powered writing assistant in the app.
What’s changing?
As part of the latest feature update package for Android phones, Gboard lands a new Writing Tools feature. And yes, as the name suggests, it does more or less the same thing as the eponymous system that ships with the Apple Intelligence bundle.
“All proofreading and rewriting of text happens on the device, which ensures your data remain private,” says Google. When you are writing something in the text field of any app using Gboard, you will now see a starry pencil icon in the top row.
Tapping on it opens the Writing Tools editor at the bottom, where the text you composed is already copied and pasted, ready for some AI-assisted editing.
What’s the outlook?
When you summon the Writing Tools system in Gboard, it will let you rephrase the message you’ve written with a single tap. Likewise, there are one-tap preset buttons that add more emotional flair to the written content or make it sound more professional.
There’s even a dedicated tool for proofreading any grammatical and spelling mistakes in your text. So far, a bunch of Android phone makers, including OnePlus and Samsung, which have embraced on-device Gemini Nano processing, have offered Writing Tools that require you to select the text and then handle the changes through the context window.
Gboard makes it a lot easier to handle such modifications without having to rely on a dedicated app or stick with a certain phone.
