Gboard is testing new text stickers to make your language more colorful

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 for text entry on Android. In addition to the basic features you’d expect from an onscreen keyboard like spell checking, next word predictions, and swipe/swipe typing, Google’s solution also offers fun extras like GIFs, stickers, and emojis. Now it looks like a new feature that lets you turn some of your text into stickers is on the way.

With a process that looks very similar to Emoji Kitchen launched 2 years agoWhere Gboard offers sticker suggestions that combine two different emoji elements, this new effort generates different styles and colors of stickers that are all based on the text (and emoji) you enter.

Let’s say you’re texting your sweetheart, and you type “see you soon” followed by a heart-shaped emoji. When you enter all you will see a sticker in the suggestion bar (where you usually get next word predictions). Clicking that will open a new side scrolling pane with a number of different sticker options to include in your message (don’t be surprised if you also see some suggestions that don’t contain any text).

The suggestions are created for many, but not necessarily all, phrases, so you may not always be able to turn the exact words you hoped for into a sticker. We note that support for very long statements already appears to be in place, not just shorter ones.

It seems that the only way to access these text stickers is via the Gboard suggestion bar. They do not appear as sticker suggestions when browsing the full emoji picker, nor do they appear when selecting from the full list of available stickers. We’re seeing this all in the latest Gboard beta, so you might not be able to access it yet if you’re on the stable version.

If you are a Snapchat user, you may have seen posts similar to this when chatting with your friends. And with this feature integrated directly into Gboard, it should be available to any app that supports the use of stickers.

Thanks Nick for giving us a heads up on this.

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