Gboard is the default keyboard on many of the best Android phones. After over a month of development and testing, the revamped shortcut toolbar looks ready to hit beta testers’ hands! With this design upgrade in place, users across the Android ecosystem can now enjoy more convenience and choice right at their fingertips.
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Before this Gboard update, users had to navigate to a three-dot menu icon near the top-right corner of their keyboard in order to customize the buttons available in the quick access toolbar. Now, that option has been moved to the far left of the menu bar and replaced with a button that shows four squares with rounded corners.
The most exciting new features appear as soon as you tap the redesigned menu button, like emoji selection , language switching, and more! Not only that, but you can also enjoy organizing your icons in this overflow menu by simply dragging them. To further customize the options that appear when you first open the keyboard, simply move items to or from the quick access toolbar – it’s that easy!
Aside from the ability to add as many shortcuts as you want, instead of four, to the quick access toolbar, the biggest change would be with the voice search button. You now have the freedom to decide which icon or entry will replace the familiar microphone image!
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This update also adds a new Privacy menu to Gboard's settings. There aren't any new options in this menu — in fact, it mostly has settings that were previously available in the now-defunct menu — but having a dedicated entry for managing Google's data collection is useful.
The latest Gboard beta update, version 12.6.06.491625702, has some amazing new features to offer, but there appears to be a server-side component to access that limits availability.
Information source: androidpolice.com
