Gboard prepares new animation for when typing hits warp speed

Does anybody practice typing anymore? Readers of a certain age will recall when keyboard skills were still taught in schools, and students competed to keep their accuracy up while still hitting new words-per-minute records. These days, you can probably get text entered faster with voice input, or through Gboard’s glide typing gestures, but there’s still something enormously satisfying about just tapping away on a keyboard at blistering speeds. And today we’ve got a little Gboard feature to share with you that’s getting ready to celebrate just that.

Anyone who has done enough text entry will know the experience of finding yourself “in the zone.” At some point, external distractions fade away, the keyboard begins feeling like just an extension of your hands, and the words flow out effortlessly. In version 18.0.3.954559732-beta-arm64-v8a of Gboard for Android, we see Google preparing a new animation that feels perfect for illustrating that experience:

How slick is that? When your input rises above Gboard’s threshold, the app will start showing those “zoom” lines to convey the overwhelming speed you’re typing at.

Right now, we don’t know much else about this effect — whether there will be an option to turn it on or off, exactly how fast you’ll need to go in order to activate it, nor whether Google’s planning any cute branding for it.

All we know for sure is that it looks very cool, and that it’s making us feel just that much more self-conscious about our abysmal touch-input typing speeds. Time to start practicing!