According to the report, the Gboard settings page now contains a new “Emojis, Stickers & GIFs” menu towards the bottom. It replaces “Search” as the third to last item on the page. Under this menu, we have two different sections: Layout and Suggestions. The Layout section features four toggles. First, we have the “Emoji switch key” toggle that lets you add a dedicated emoji key to the keyboard. Adding this key will disable the language switch key though. “Emoji fast-access row” will add a row of your popular and frequently used emojis on the main keyboard. If you feel an emoji row on the main keyboard will cover too much of your screen real estate, you can instead choose to have a row of recently used emojis in the symbols keyboard with the “Emojis in symbols keyboard” toggle. Lastly, the “Emoji with the physical keyboard” toggle will let you show the emoji keyboard with the physical Alt key. The Suggestions section under the new “Emojis, Stickers & GIFs” Gboard settings menu also features multiple toggles. The “Predictive content search” toggle, as you might have guessed, suggests content (GIF, emoji, sticker) to browse. “Suggestions while typing” also does what its name suggests, i.e. show emoji ad sticker suggestions while you’re typing. For this menu, you can turn on the emoji and sticker suggestion toggles separately. “Emoji Stickers” is the last toggle that will suggest similar stickers when you select an emoji on Gboard.
These aren’t new features or settings on Gboard
These aren’t new features or settings on Gboard
Interestingly, none of these toggles are entirely new features on Gboard. But the options that we now have under the new “Emojis, Stickers & GIFs” menu were previously housed in “Preferences”, “Advanced”, or “Text correction” settings. These menus also still exist, but Google has taken all the emoji, sticker, and GIF-related settings out of them and housed them under the new menu. This certainly streamlines things and makes it easier for users to discover those toggles, as they don’t need to go looking into multiple menus for similar settings. The “Emojis, Stickers & GIFs” settings menu is now appearing for users on the latest Gboard beta (version 10.8) on Android 12. It could soon make its way to devices on Android 11 and older as well.
