Google’s Gboard keyboard for Android is gaining translation, new themes

Why it matters to you

Google’s Gboard, the search giant’s alternative keyboard for Android and iOS, will soon let you type in another language.

Let it never be said that Gboard, the Google-made third-party keyboard for iOS and Android, doesn’t get a lot of the search giant’s attention. Starting in March, it is gaining a few useful new features in the form of automatic translation, new themes, and minor aesthetic tweaks.

As far as new features go, Gboard’s language translation feature is pretty self-explanatory: It transcribes words into any of the more than 90 languages that Google Translate, Google’s translation service, supports. Once you tap the Translate icon and select a language from the drop-down menu of options, Gboard sends the words you type to Google’s server and pastes the translated result into the app.

More: Google’s new iOS keyboard is the only one you’ll even need to download

One minor drawback worth noting is that translation only works online — even if you’ve saved a language for offline use.

Translating between languages isn’t the only new trick up the beta version of Gboard’s sleeve. It lets you beautify the keyboard with color themes — an improved selector user interface separates solid color themes, recently used themes, and landscape images into separate, easy-to-navigate rows.

Gboard’s update also boasts a “predictive emoji” feature that suggests the emoticon you’re most likely to use next. It adds a shortcut to Android’s voice dictation settings, too, and introduces supports for the Bashkir language.

More: Google brings Gboard search features to the Google Keyboard app on Android

The beta version is available for Android users who opt into the search giant’s testing platform.

Google, which introduced Gboard in May, hasn’t let it stagnate. In August, the search giant added support for five new languages (Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, and French) and Smart GIF, a feature that automatically suggests emoticons for certain things you type — texting “let’s party,” for example, serves up images of balloons, dancing skeletons, and other thematically relevant doodles. In January, Google rolled out the keyboard to Google app users on Android — if you have the Google app installed, you can enable Gboard without needing to download it separately.

Privacy concerns marred its initial release, but Google later clarified that words and phrases typed using Gboard weren’t passed through the search giant’s servers.

“Gboard will remember words you type to help you with spelling or to predict searches you might be interested in, but this data is stored only on your device,” according to its support page. “This data can’t be accessed by Google or by any apps other than Gboard.”