Google’s Gboard is thego-to keyboard appfor most of thebest Android phoneson the market. The app is loaded with features like Emoji Kitchen and accessibility tricks like one-handed mode. The company has also been working on a few AI smarts, like a proofreading utility. After a brief break from makinganother weird keyboard, it appears the Gboard team is back at work, beta testing a Google Lens-style OCR feature for the keyboard app.
Gboard has plenty of innovative tricksup its sleeve, like the arrow keys used to move the cursor, support for one-handed mode, floating keyboard, etc. However, none of these features overlap with other Google products, because the company hasn’t developed any other keyboard app. However, amidst the recent push for AI, Google and other tech giants are creating overlapping features. Google already has fartoo many text composition assists for its own good, and Gboard is now following suit with a feature Google Lens already has, albeit with a few advantages.
The latest beta build for Gboard, version 13.6, has a hidden utility calledScan text. As the name suggests, it uses your device’s camera to insert text from a picture directly into a text field you select, without tying the whole thing out manually.Nail Sadykovof theGoogle News Telegram channel, who first spotted the feature, explains that you may find it alongside the Translate andAI-powered Proofread optionsin Gboard.
Once activated, Gboard will request the Android system for access to your camera. If you grant that permission, you will see the bottom half of your screen turn into a camera viewfinder, which you can point at printed text and then tap the shutter button. After that, Gboard performs optical character recognition (OCR) on the picture to identify any text, just like Google Lens would when you try translating text. Sadykov explains you can then tap the text to highlight it, and anInsertbutton should appear. Tapping it pastes the selected text in the text field of whatever app you’re using. Gboard preserves your cursor position after the paste operation, and doesn’t default to keyboard mode in case you want to reuse OCR.
This Scan text feature in Gboard could save you a lot of time spent re-typing things, or juggling between Lens and another app just to use the former’s OCR capabilities. Pixel users may find this handy too, despite enjoying support for OCR right in the multitasking view. Scan text can be convenient for people who regularly need OCR tools, but for most others, using Lens for the tedious route suffices as well. That said, Scan text is still hidden behind flags in Gboard v13.6 beta, which you candownload from APKMirror. We await a future beta release when testers can access this feature to iron out glitches before the eventual release.
