TL;DR
- Google Keep has been developing a new mode for handwriting input.
- You’ll be able to manipulate individual written strings and convert them to text at will.
- A new settings option allows the handwriting recognition model to be updated.
Google Keep is working on a new mode for notes. Last month, we checked out progress the app was making on a new Keep “handwriting” interface, separate and distinct from its existing drawing tools. While that still hasn’t gone live, we’ve continued our work looking for further development along this line, and have uncovered some new details about how Keep’s handwriting mode will likely work.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Keep already has some built-in OCR functionality, letting you incorporate text from pictures, downloaded images, or even things you doodle with the app’s drawing tools. When you’re working with that interface, you can select “grab image text” to pull any text the app finds and put it into the text of the note.
Right now, that’s an all-or-nothing affair, and if you’ve got a wall of text you’re looking at, that’s all coming into your note, all at once. But with Keep’s handwriting mode, you’ll be able to interact with strings of text as discrete objects, as you can see here:
Key to text input, you can select any one of those strings and “copy as text,” letting you move just the words you want into the note’s text field. That sounds really handy for when you’re jotting down a lot of thoughts without stopping to edit yourself along the way, but only later want to keep some of that in a more shareable form.
Another change that Google’s working on for Keep in regards to handwriting mode looks like it will let the app get better and better at recognize your chicken-scratch scrawls. We spotted a new option in the app’s settings that lets you manually check to see if there’s an update available specifically for handwriting recognition. That sure sounds like a way to update the model used to convert handwriting into text, but we also see it delivering functional changes to the app — here, the “copy as text” feature we just talked about only started working after an update.
It’s a little odd to see this public-facing, rather than the sort of thing Google would update automatically, totally behind the scenes. But even if this option disappears from the app’s settings by the time handwriting mode is ready for prime time, Google may still be able to keep the handwriting model up to date outside of regular Keep updates.
Will we uncover any more of handwriting mode’s secrets before it launches? Keep checking in with Android Authority to learn everything we find in our teardowns.
