The Google Keyboard is a very popular keyboard on Android used by millions of people every single day. Let’s take a look at how to customize the application to your liking.
It’s rather interesting to learn how many people don’t know that there is a settings area for the Google Keyboard application. When I sit and think about it though, it’s not like the settings are easily accessible. For instance, when I download the SwiftKey keyboard application, it puts an application icon in my app drawer. I know that I can always go and launch this application to dive into the settings and configure it how I like it.
SwiftKey takes this a step further and gives you a way to actually access the settings of the keyboard while the keyboard is up.
This is not something that Google makes readily available for one reason or another. It seems like a button/key could be put in the keyboard itself and then users could instantly access it whenever the keyboard is up, just like SwiftKey does. I think this is the most logical solution since Google doesn’t have an application icon to represent Google Keyboard. Again, I’m not entirely sure why Google does this because the company has been adding quite a number of features to the application and there are some interesting things that you can set in there.
I’m going to be doing a series of articles detailing the various features of Google Keyboard so that more people can learn what can be changed and done with it.
Google Keyboard Access Settings
- Launch the Settings Application
- Scroll Down and Then Tap on the ‘Language & Input’ Option
- Look in the ‘Keyboard & Input Methods’ Section
- Tap on Google Keyboard(you may have to have it enabled/selected first)
Explanation
It’s so strange to see the settings of Google Keyboard buried so deep within the core Android settings application. Especially when we consider how user friendly the company is trying to make Android. It just doesn’t make sense to be but as you can see, you have to dig into three different menu areas within the Settings application before you can finally have access to the Google Keyboard settings. If you’re wanting to access the settings, you probably already have the keyboard selected, but I wanted to make sure that you know that you probably need to have it enabled before you can access the settings.
For those who are adventurous, go ahead and explore around here and see which settings and features you might like to tweak or change. As mentioned, I’m going to be doing a series of articles about the different features that we have for this application. So if you don’t want to explore for yourself, or you’re simply curious to see what I can uncover, then stay tuned here and I’ll be whipping up some more in-depth articles about Google Keyboard over the next few days.
I would be very curious to hear what your favorite tweaks are for the Google Keyboard? Do you like to change the theme? Do you like to change the dictionary or adjust the long press delay? Let me know your favorites in the comments section below.
