Gboard’s new magic wand button is basically Translate for emoji
Whatever your opinion is on emoji, they’ve become an essential part of our texting and messaging lives. Some people use them very sparingly, while others enjoy treading into the potentially obnoxious range and using more emoji than actual words. If you want to jazz up something you’re writing with a few emoji, but aren’t sure which ones to use, worry not —Gboardis rolling out a new feature that tries to make that choice for you.
Some users have started to see a magic wand button on their keyboard, as of the latest update. When you’re finished writing a sentence, tapping the button will insert a handful of emoji that Gboard thinks are the closest match to what you’ve written.
There are two modes here — tapping once will put an emoji translationafteryour text, and tapping it twice will insert one emoji between each word. Sometimes it works pretty well, while in other sentences, it’s kind of a hit-or-miss thing. So far it looks like you need your keyboard set to English, but we may see support for more languages in the future.
If you want to try it out on your device, make sure your Gboard appis fully updated, and maybesign up to the beta programandtry the most recent betaif the latest stable version doesn’t do the trick. While testing, we had to enable the emoji row in the app’s settings in order for the wand to initially show up, but it stuck around after — something you could try if it’s not showing up for you. Ultimately, though, it looks like this is a staged rollout, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t appear right now for you at all — it might just pop up on your phone within the next few days.
Thanks:Moshe
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