Gboard’s real-time translation feature now works with your voice

Ben Schoon | Aug 11 2020 - 8:19 am PT

Google’s Gboard keyboard has been picking up a bunch of new features over the past several days, and now, it’s rolling out another. Real-time translation is coming to Gboard for voice dictation, and it’s rolling out now for Android users.

Confirmed to Android Police, Google says that this real-time translation and transcription feature is heading to every Android smartphone with the latest Gboard updates. The company had previously made quiet mention of the feature in a changelog, but it never rolled out to users before today.

Gboard has offered translation for about three years now, but the feature only worked for text being manually typed. Still handy, but it locked out the users who rely on voice transcription on a regular basis. Now, that’s changing. A simple tap of the microphone icon when you’re using Gboard’s translation feature (Gboard > Overflow menu > Translate) will see anything you say transcribed in the language of your choosing.

As seen below, this can be handy for replying to a message in another language, but it could also be used for transcribing another user’s words into an app like Google Keep without constantly jumping back and forth between the full Google Translate app. Apparently, this feature also works with the hands-free UI that we detailed over the weekend

This handy new feature is available on Gboard for all Android phones, but it seems it may require a server-side change. It should work, though, on both beta and stable versions of the keyboard.