Image credit – Android Police
One of the ways of interacting with Google Assistant on your Pixel device is through voice. However Google Assistant also lives in Google’s Allo messenger app, in which you interact with the AI using the keyboard. Now it looks like soon you could use keyboard input to interact with Google Assistant outside of Allo as well.
This is according to Google’s beta application in which it was spotted that keyboard input could be an upcoming feature, thanks to the addition of a new keyboard icon. Presumably when tapped, it will change Google Assistant’s interface into one that you could write out commands using the keyboard. This might be ideal if you’re trying to do certain things and you can’t use your voice, or if Assistant is having a hard time trying to understand what you’re saying.
In addition to keyboard input, the folks at Android Police who did the APK teardown also revealed that there could be a new feature called “Search gestures”, in which it sounds like you could activate Google Search through gestures instead of tapping the search bar. Whether or not this will actually be more efficient remains to be seen.
No word on when Google plans on rolling out these new features but it could be that they will be server-side enabled, meaning that no action will be needed from your side, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled anyway.
Filed in . Read more about Android, Google and Google Assistant.