You can type, glide, and even use your voice to compose a message. But it looks like Google isn’t quite satisfied with just that, and a discovery shows that the company is working on bringing sign language on board as a new way to communicate on your Android phone. More specifically, this feature would be a part of Gboard, which would be able to read sign language and convert it into text.
This one if going to be huge
Android Authority uncovered Gboard’s Sign-to-text feature by digging through the code of the beta version of the app. While the news outlet wasn’t able to get the feature working, it was able to provide some images of the interface, giving us a small peek of what’s to come.
When activated, Sign-to-text will let you know that you can just sign to the phone, and it will convert it to text using the power of AI. Google adds a disclaimer, sharing that the video never goes to the cloud, but the data points for the sign language will for processing purposes.
These types of advancements can be huge, so we always love to see more accessibility features from Google since they are extremely important.
Will it roll out support for all languages?
Now, while all of this is exciting, there is the question of what languages it will be supporting. If you aren’t aware, many different types of sign language are used around the world. Because of this, there’s a good chance that it may only launch in specific regions at first.
On the opposite end, while it’s highly unlikely, if Google has training data, it may be able to launch this feature globally. Again, this is just something in the code for now, so there’s a chance that we have a long road ahead of us to see it launch to the public app.
While it’s exciting to be able to see what Google is working on, we always have to be ready to be disappointed because there’s always the chance that Google could shelve this feature too. For now, we can only wait and see, and hope that there will be another update that signals it’s closer to a public release.
Regardless of what happens, Gboard will be the standard for most people. Not only does it provide an accurate typing experience, but it also offers features that cannot be found on any other third-party keyboard. Many folks experiment but find that Gboard’s offerings are just far superior when compared to its competitors.
