Think: Emoji Kitchen, but with words
Third-party keyboard options like Microsoft’s SwiftKey can be great, but for many of us Gboard is still the gold standard of text entry on Android. In addition to the basic features you’d expect from an on-screen keyboard like spell-check, next-word predictions, and glide/swipe typing, Google’s solution also offers fun additions like GIFs, stickers, and emoji. Now a new feature allowing you to convert some of your text into stickers appears to be on the way.
With operation that feels very similar to the Emoji Kitchen that launched a couple of years back, where Gboard offers sticker suggestions that combine elements of two different emoji, this new effort generates various styles and colors of stickers that are all based on the text (and emoji) you’re entering.
Let’s say you’re texting your significant other, and you type “See you soon” followed by a heart emoji. Upon entering all that you’ll see a sticker in the suggestion strip (where you typically get next-word predictions). Tapping that will open a new side-scrolling bit containing up a number of different sticker options to insert into your message (don’t be surprised if you also see some suggestions that don’t contain any text).
Suggestions appear to be generated for many phrases, but not necessarily all, so you may not always be able to convert exactly the words you were hoping into a sticker. We do notice that support for quite long phrases seems present already, not just the shorter ones.
It seems as though the only way to access these text-based stickers is via Gboard’s suggestion strip. They don’t appear as sticker suggestions when browsing the full emoji picker, nor are they present when choosing from the full list of available stickers. We’re seeing this all in the latest Gboard beta, so you may not have access to it yet if you are using the stable version.
If you’re a Snapchat user, you may have seen functionality similar to this when chatting up your friends. With this feature being built directly into Gboard, however, it should be available to just about any app which supports the use of stickers.
Thanks to Nick for giving us the heads-up on this one.
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