Today Google released a brand new app to the Google Play Store, Google Keyboard. The app will take up 15.28MB of space on your memory. Some of the key features are:
- Gesture Typing with dynamic floating preview
- Voice Typing
- Next-word suggestions and current-word completions
- Dictionaries for 26 languages
- Advanced keyboard layouts
- Works across your Android devices (tablets and phones)
This keyboard has a Swype like gesture typing option which is something that I have grown to love. Prior to testing out this app I was using SwiftKey as my daily driver keyboard. The other keyboard option was a third party Jelly Bean Keyboard, both apps available in the Play Store. The new Google Keyboard is like a mix of the two apps.
When you first open the app up just after downloading it, a welcome screen will show up and guide you through about 3 steps to get going. After the set up is finished you are all set. If you want to configure more options like languages, vibrate/sound on key press, predictive text, etc head on over the app settings from the system settings. If you are familiar with the Jelly Bean Keyboard the settings are basically identical.
Lets talk about performance. The first test I did was a simple tap texting test and the words typed out exactly what I wanted. The next test was the gesture (Swype) style and the again the words came out exactly how I wanted the type out. The last test was the voice to text feature, which performed yet again at an excellent accurate typing test. So as far as accuracy goes I really think that this keyboard performs quite well.
There are a slew of options to adapt the settings to how you want the typing experience to go. One of the things that I enjoyed about SwiftKey is the app learns your typing style and habits. I will have to do more research but I am not sure how close Google has implemented that feature to this new Google Keyboard.
Check out the video for yourself to see how Google Keyboard performs and see the firsthand hands-on review.
