After we first spotted in August, Gboard is now rolling out an “enhanced voice typing” experience that features the new Google Assistant found on the latest Pixel phones. However, it’s not working for most users.
Pixel 4/XL, Pixel 4a, and Pixel 5 users today are encountering a “New!” banner after opening Gboard and tapping the microphone icon. The feature is billed as helping you “Save time typing” by leveraging the Assistant.
For example, you can say “Clear” to delete what was transcribed instead of having to manually use the backspace key. That appears to be the only command available today, though “Send” should also be another one.
In addition to Gboard’s “Speak now to dictate” prompt, the new Google Assistant light bar slides in from the sides of the screen before pooling together at the bottom to provide visual confirmation. The indicator in the top-right corner works like before.
Under the Voice typing menu in Gboard settings, an “Enhanced” option appears:
Enabled enhanced voice typing with voice commands provided by Assistant.
There’s also an option to “automatically add punctuation while dictating.” With the previous experience, users had to manually say ‘period,’ ‘comma,’ or or ‘question/exclamation mark.’ It can be enabled/disabled independent of the main capability. In our brief testing, it works quite well.
This new option coincides with last year’s “faster voice typing,” which downloads an offline model to your device and works in real-time.
As of today, this feature is rolling out to Pixel phones that feature the “new Google Assistant” and have the latest Gboard beta (version 10.0+) installed.
While the enhanced voice typing UI appears, it does not work on two of our devices. We’ve only had luck using the new feature on a single Pixel 5, suggesting this isn’t a full launch. Navigate to settings (third screenshot above) and disable that second toggle to return to the previous experience.
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