I am sure you may have read our article where we compared both the keyboard apps, Gboard vs Swiftkey
If not you can click the link to read the article. In the end, I Praised the SwiftKey and preferred it over Gboard.
But, one thing, I did not mention is that the reason why Gboard is still installed on my smartphone and why I use it on a daily basis is because of one particular reason.
And the reason is,
Gboard’s placement of the mic button for speech to text aka voice typing.
Both Gboard and SwiftKey offer speech to text feature, which has become my current favorite way to type faster.
I was using the text to speech feature on Swiftkey, prior to using Gboard app, it was quite a tiring experience because of the way it behaves on Swiftkey.
When you switch to speech to text in SwiftKey, the entire text keyboard is replaced by a simple big mic button, which can be tapped to activate and deactivate the mic.
When you talk to it, it converts your voice into text flawlessly, but and if you have to insert a comma or a full stop or go to next line, you have to switch back to the keyboard form, since commands do not work in the speech to text.
And, a comma is typed as a (‘) full stop is typed in place of (.) and it types ‘new line’ when you try to say the command to go it to the next line.
Either you have to go back to the keyboard form to do these little from things on the way, or you have to spend some extra time in formatting at the end of the text to speech session.
And I was fine with the entire thing after the speech to text session until I started using Gboard, which has a better placement of the mic, on the right-hand side of the prediction bar, so that it can be used without, replacing the entire keyboard with a mic button.
So, simple formatting, such as, inserting a comma, full stop, or going to the next line, is easier than it is in SwiftKey. Which means you have to spend less time in formatting after you are done with the speech to text.
This may be a small thing but it has allowed me to write long-form content even on my smartphone, such as this one, which has entirely been written on my smartphone using the Gboard keyboard app.
And the first draft of this post had 500-words, which was done in less than 5 minutes, which is kind of awesome.
If you are not using Gboard, I think you should give it a try, because it not only offers this unique feature that is awesome for me and for everyone who uses text to speech, but it also has got an amazing feature of integrated Google search which makes life easier if you are looking for something on Google and want to share it in messenger.
Again, since I have praised that so much, I would like to put a disclaimer that I have not been paid to say that and this is not a sponsored post at least until now.:-)
